Travelling by imagination

In Week 2 of the Writing Club for 3rd and 4th, we took a look at a crazy poem by Michael Rosen called 'Orange':
Help!
I'm stuck in an orange.
I can't get out.
It's really orange in here,
And wet.

We wondered if it made sense or not, and even though we agreed it was bananas (ha ha), we could still picture it in our heads and it made a kind of sense. We then had a chat about how we could make people who had never seen an orange (the same way that we had never seen a person stuck in one) get what an orange is like. For that we used our 5 senses and tried to describe precisely this fleshy, juicy, spotty, peely, acidic fruit.
That led us to write some fun riddles about other things, from dogs to snakes to pencil cases, before moving on to our ongoing project of a 'travel journal'.

After travelling by memory last week, we used our imaginations this time to get us to weird and wonderful places: Singing Street, Wifi Land, Sugar Land, and lots more. We thought about the people who lived there, the rules they lived under, the food they ate, what they saw from their window, what the weather was like and so on. Our five senses came in handy once again to make these invented places feel 'real'.

We even started writing postcards from over there, but time ran away with us...
See you all next week for more writing explorations!

World Book Day!

Last week, there was a lot of bookish activity in SMGS for World Book Day: a very successful book swap, trips to bookshops and librairies, the works!
To add to the general excitement, I did three class visits on Thursday to chat about books, have some interactive story time and create our own masterpieces.
First up were the Junior Infants. We read the story of a young giant called David who is forever breaking things because he is too strong, too big... too giant! So much so that people call him Disaster David. The Junior Infants were brilliant listeners and great predictors of what might happen next. After that, we created our very own sequel to David's adventure, The King's Book: there was some awesome drawing and writing, that we gathered into a collective book. The book is now bound and ready to be borrowed in the class library!

Up with 2nd class, we went for something different and looked at how my book In Search of Happiness came into being. That brought us to chat about all the many things that made us happy and we used them to write a collective list poem. You can read it here as it came out: pretty good for a first draft, wouldn't you say? Second Class was fantastic at coming up with striking images and sharing their feelings. They even brought in a few sneaky rhymes!

The day ended with a visit to First Class who also discovered Disaster David's adventures. This had them thinking about what it would feel like to wake up... as a giant. There was some brilliant problem solving and great imagination on display once again. After a fun brainstorming, each took pen to paper to draw themselves as a giant and to write about that very strange morning...

Thank you all for a brilliant day!

Writing club is back!

This time the group is made up of a dozen of 3rd and 4th class writers. In our first session, we let ourselves be inspired by various illustrations from magazines and books. Even in only a few minutes, the ideas came gushing out and the style and interest of each writer started showing.

There were some brilliant mind maps, folk tales and adventure stories being sketched and fleshed out. While we were at it, we had conversations about the difficulty of making choices when you are plotting or writing a story. Something all present could relate to!

We then moved on to our long-term project of putting together a travel journal. As we're not going to go anywhere in the next few weeks, we're going to have to use other means of transportation than planes and boats and hot air balloons.

This week, we travelled by memory and tried to remember everything about a great trip (near or far) we had taken in the past. Using drawing and writing, we made a great start on our 'journals' and once again each author's voice shone even in those early stages.
See you all next week!

Writing Club: the end!

Another action-packed day for our last session with the 1st and 2nd class writers. We continued looking at how little changes could totally transform a story with a game of rumours.
And we did some brain gymnastics by trying to find a path between a story beginning and an ending, both drawn out of a hat. Some of the resulting random combos were harder to link up than others, but every one tried their best and came up with really interesting stories.

Every body then went home with all of their writing and some new ideas for future stories.
Well done all, it was an absolute pleasure!

Baby Book Club: make some noise!

Last week at Baby Book Club we made lots of noise, as in, more than usual! We were reading Ellie Sandall's brilliant Every Bunny Dance and practising our dance moves, our singing voices and also our quiet whispery voices in case the Fox found us.
We took turns trying out all sorts of musical instruments including maracas, tambourines, rain sticks, wooden frogs and really loud bells.
And for the fun to continue at home (and everywhere, really) we made our own shakers to take away.

The babies really enjoyed the tactile aspect of the session (even more than the oral and aural one!): manipulating the instruments and later on filling the toilet rolls with seeds and finally painting with cotton buds.

As promised, here are the links to some cool videos to keep the love of music going...

Here you will find the sound of lots of musical instruments

Peter and the Wolf, a classic about a brave boy, a hungry wolf and music! Check out this lovely version (not too scary) by the Royal Ballet.

And why not try one of these...

Play with real instruments at a National Concert Hall family workshop (all ages), info here.

Or attend a Baby Rave! In Belfast on 25 February and 11-12 March for instance. Info here.

See you next time!

Writing Club, onwards and forwards

Week 3 of Writing Club with 1st and 2nd class, and it really feels like a club. We know where we're at, what we're doing and more or less where we're going. But of course, there's always going to be surprises along the way and things never quite go according to plan...
We experimented with that very idea with our first game this week. We played Chinese Whispers and with over 10 of us repeating (only once!) a silly sentence full of alliterations and tricky words, the end result was quite... interesting!

On the left, the original. On the right, the VERY original result.

We then went back to our long-term project and used everything we had produced so far to do a bit of planning (plotting). We looked at the main things that need to happen a story: a beginning, a middle and an end, and we paid particular attention to the middle: the problem, the solution, and wondered: is one of each enough or is it too easy?

Most of the writers used all this thinking to continue on with their story (and finish it!) while others revised their plans and decided to use a different setting, a different problem or, in extreme cases, different characters. It's part of the game, after all: you're allowed to change your mind!
A lot of writing was done and we even got started on our book covers!

Writing Club: the story continues

Back with the Writing Clubbers from 1st and 2nd class this week for more fun and crazyness!
As a warm-up and to shake the school day out, we played a game of narrative chairs. Never heard of narrative chairs? It's like musical chairs, but with a story instead of a song. In this case, we listened to The Exquisite Corpse Adventure  which you can read and listen to here.

Keeping in that vein, we then played two games of exquisite corpses, one with pictures and the other with words, which pushed us sneakily into grammatical territory... and toilet humour. Those two things are not mutually exclusive!

We had great fun trying to make sense of the nonsensical sentences we produced by writing one word each without knowing what came before or after each player's contribution. And even with something as random and weird, the beginnings of stories were already fizzing.

Finally we went back to our long-term project and looked at it from the point of view of setting. We were thinking about places where our stories could take place, drawing maps and jotting down ideas. We talked about setting our adventures in gardens, jungles, trains, in France, in Legoland, in Disneyland, in brains and drains... Each place featured details that may turn into plot points: baddies, obstacles, tornadoes, secret tunnels... It is as if the stories were already writing themselves.
Well done all and see you next week!