WELL THIS IS HOW... Liz, Erica, Brian, Penny, Fiona, Vinny and Andrew are the dynamic team that research, collaborate, write, edit, design, layout, and compile the Sparkles especially for you.

The Daily and Weekly Sparkles  TM

Have you ever wondered how your Sparkles are created?

...writes  Do  You  Remember?

...writes  Quiz  and  Singalong.

...writes  Today  in  HistoryThe  Way  We  Were,  and  Over  To  You

...does  the  editing  design  and  layout.

...merges  your  home  name  onto  the  database.

...checks  the  Daily  and  Weekly  for  accuracy

LIZERI

CABRI

AN

PENNY

1

2 FIONA3

VINNY4

ANDREW5 ...does  the  Dinal  check  before  your  Sparkles  arrive  in  your  Inbox  on  Wednesdays.

Dear Readers

Now that The Daily Sparkle has been in circulation for xxxx months, and new subscribers continue to sign up to become Sparkles Readers, we thought you might like to know a bit about what goes on behind the scenes.

We are a small production team, dedicated to making The Daily Sparkle interesting and fun to read. We aim to make it stimulating and a prompt for all the discussion and activities that help to keep people engaged and communicating.

Many of the articles are based on material from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Your feedback, and what we know from our own experience of working with older people, tells us that for many people now in residential care, those decades were significant periods in their lives. Images and references from advertising, popular songs, dressmaking patterns, magazines, cookery books and radio or TV programmes all help to trigger memories.

What we try to do in producing the Sparkles mixture is to strike a balance. Some images from the 30s and 40s can be very nostalgic, but they provide a technical challenge in that they don’t always reproduce very well. The same applies to some of the old black and white photographs. Commercial magazines like Good Housekeeping or Cosmopolitan sometimes use vintage pictures from photographic agencies like Getty Images or Hulton Picture Library. We can’t do this, because they can cost hundreds of pounds for a single picture, and it would push up the cost of the Daily Sparkle to an unreasonable level.

Where we can, we use bright clear pictures, or as big an image of the subject as possible.

We do try to do this because we know that for people whose eyesight might not be as good as it used to be, this helps. We can do it more easily with some topics - a rose or an egg looked pretty much the same in 1949 as it does now and modern photos are OK. But there aren’t always clear bright images available - pictures of an air raid shelter, or a street party for the Coronation for example are likely to be small black and white photos, but if they fit the text, we choose the best we can find.

Researching the topics and themes is always interesting and rewarding to do. We try to ensure that there is something for everyone in each edition, so we’re always keen to know what you would like more of! We know that not everyone is interested in, say, royalty or pop music, but we choose things that we think people will remember. (And sometimes a bit of controversy promotes interesting debate!) Although we try to check facts and dates carefully, there will inevitably be occasional inaccuracies. There will often be differences of opinion too. Do write in and tell us - it helps to generate debate and discussion.

Today in History sometimes presents a challenge when there appears to have been a run of aircrashes, murders, and natural disasters with thousands killed. Whilst we don't want The Daily Sparkle   to be bland and only write about 'nice' things (how dull!) we don't want a week of doom and gloom. The chances are that if we run an article about Sir Frances Drake or the invention of the light-bulb, it's because newspaper headlines for that particular week in the 40s/50s/60s were too depressing!