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04 March 2025

Posted by Harley Truslove

Rubber Ducks & Writing Festivals

Sue was leading our group this evening, and we were trying out some writing activities that will be taking place at the Bournemouth Writing Festival (25th-27th April)! Spanning the day of April 26th there will be ArtfulScribe-led workshops for children of all ages - so be sure to drop in and check it out.


We had a whole heap of different things to try, so without further ado, let’s look at what our writers got up to…


To start with, Sue got us to trace around our hands and write what we liked about writing on one hand, and what we didn’t on the other. We all had a chat about our results and saw that similar things surface within our writers - dislike of dialogue, a favouring of descriptive scenes, and an absolute hatred of editing!


Our writers then all took a rubber duck from the middle of the table and filled out a character sheet on them, leading us to realise not everyone knows what an MBTI is…


When we were done with our duck factfiles, we played a game of a one-word-at-a-time story, tossing a ball between us to decide who would go next in the sentence (as well as testing our hand-eye coordination). Here is what we ended up with:



The birds flew into the powerlines and an eagle flew oppositely over the train tracks and the ogre committee celebrated.



Which makes about as much sense as we expected it to!


Not slowing down on the action, we played a game that some might know as “heads up”, where we wrote a fictional character on a post-it note and stuck it to someone else’s head to guess. Between the characters of Aslan, Percy Jackson, Dracula, Fagin, and Donald Duck, it got very spirited as we all tried to work out our characters!


Finally Sue had a sensory box, where our writers had to stick their hands in and describe what they felt, getting the others to guess the item, such as a stone, a bottle of handcream, and a skipping rope.


It was a great night full of loads of different activities - make sure to get down to Bournemouth Writing Festival to take advantage of all the fun!


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