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15 October 2022

Posted by Beth McKeeman

Microworld Animal Crossings

Juniors - 13 Young - 11

What do you get when you cross a cat with a squirrel? It’s not the start of a joke. Our Junior Writers were making animal crossings this week. And for those wondering, the answer is a sqat.

After watching a fantastic performance last week, we spent the session wondering what creatures the two travellers might have found just around the corner at the end of the show.

As we suggested animals for each other to jumble together, we ended up with increasingly wild and wacky creatures. What better way to bring them to life than by drawing them and bullet pointing all the facts we could think of. What do they eat? What noise do they make? What temperament do they have? Do they have fur or scales, what does that feel like? Where do they live?

We then continued Stories of the Dust where it ended, with the two travellers reaching ‘beyond the corner’ and finding our crossed animals there.

In Young Writers we focused on microworlds, creating a room for our characters to exist in.

We started with a picture of a random room from a game backdrop and listed everything we could see in it, describing the objects and if there was any meaning behind them.

During a quick story time visit to Oz, we thought about how settings can be implemented in a narrative. As Dorothy moved through the overwhelming green of the Emerald City we discussed Chekov’s Gun and Red Herrings and whether we needed to include everything we could list in the written description. We may find out a lot about the goods on offer in Oz’s shops, but we don’t get told how many buttons are on the guards uniform, for example, because that isn’t relevant to building the setting in the readers minds or to the plot.

We then applied all this to our own characters, creating a room or place they often frequent. Our writers built it up from a list of objects to descriptions to a 3rd person walk around the space.

As our worlds begin to form, I’m really excited to see where they’ll lead. Stick around to see.

Rafsan's animal crossing

Rebecca's animal crossing

Milan's animal crossing

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