Thousands of copyright-free illustrations and designs are available in combined book and CD-Rom sets from Dover Publications. The electronic clip-art CDs feature numerous visual styles: from ancient Chinese or Egyptian motifs via Victorian floral sentimentalities and Art Nouveau frames and borders to multiple calligraphic forms. Part of Dover’s vast pictorial archive, they can be used for direct cut-and-pasting on any Macintosh or Windows-compatible computer. Dover’s catalogue also features fascinating ranges of woodcuts, silhouettes, photographs, symbols, fashion plates, ornaments, folk designs, posters, drawings, stencils and stained glass - an extraordinarily extensive set of stimuli for the visual appetite.
Dover’s book and CD-Rom sets, available from the Dover Books website, cost from pound;8.47. Sets of laser-cut plastic stencils are also available for pound;8.95. The Dover Bookshop, 18 Earlham St, London WC2H 9LN. Tel: 020 7836 2111.Website: www.doverbooks.co.uk Living Woods is a way of transforming children’s seemingly endless ability to absorb soft drinks into classroom resources and young trees. A promotion jointly mounted by Calypso drinks and the Woodland Trust, it encourages children to save the green straws from their lunch-time thirst-quencher and exchange them forsuch items as posters on weather and wild-life, pollution research packs and, for the more persistent imbibers, microscopes and CD-Roms. There is also an opportunity to create a Green Book on environmental themes, in return for which a tree will be planted and nurtured on the school’s behalf.
Teacher’s packs and registration from The Calypso Living Woods Promotion, PO Box 476, Llangollen, LL20 8TT. Tel: 0845 6021904.Website: www.calypso.co.uk
Rivers can flow through the school computer with the arrival in classrooms of Riverside Explorer, a CD-Rom produced by the Environment Agency. It incorporates a database of maps, photographs and surveys of more than 4,000 river sites. For pupils at key stages 2 and 3, there are modules on habitats and the shaping of land patterns, together with case studies, the means to make a virtual survey, and a comprehensive glossary. There is also a competition forthe best original case studiesusing the CD-Rom. Entries mustbe submitted by the end ofNovember.
The CD-Rom has been sent to schools in England and will be sent to schools in Wales this month, along with Ordnance Survey’s magazine Mapping News. For further information, contact the Environment Agency, on 01454 624400. www.environment-agency.gov.uk
Tom Deveson
