15 October 2022

The Missing Farmer/ Blackout Poetry & DADA

15th October

Junior Writers:

THE MISSING FARMER!

Today was our last session before half term and so we spent it being detectives and solving the case of The Missing Farmer.

To solve the case there were four rounds of writing prompts and each prompt was spelt out on coloured stickers hidden around the room.

In the 1st round the writers had to find 5 blue shapes and rearrange the letters to work out who kidnapped the Farmer.

After all the letters had been found it was discovered a 'LLAMA' from the farm had taken the Farmer and the writers had to create a short poem about these characters.

The 2nd round was about where the Farmer had been taken. The letters on the orange stars hidden around the room revealed that he was being held captive in TESCOS!

The writers then had to write a spooky description of Tescos and imagine it as a scary place.

In the 3rd round 4 Jigsaw pieces revealed that the Llama wanted a 'CAKE' and that was his reason for kidnapping the Farmer. The writers wrote a short script about the Llama explaining this to his victim!

In the last round we needed to discover why this had all happened. 8 hidden green shapes revealed it was because the Farmer had forgotten his Llamas 'BIRTHDAY'. Using all the information from the 4 tasks the writers wrote an ending to the story. Would the Llama be forgiven and get the birthday cake it dreamed of, would the Farmer escape and eat all the cake himself?...find out in the stories below.

Young Writers

Our final session before half term (it’s gone so fast!) and we had a smorgasbord of options for the Young Writers, with three different activities taking place:

Young Writers could continue writing their Simpsons episode from the last week. They had to choose a scene from the episode they’d like to further develop and consider which characters they’d like to appear and how it would affect the narrative. How would the main character (Bart or Lisa) change as a result of the scene?
We created some blackout poetry, similar to one of our sessions last year, with the Young Writers being given song lyrics (Billy Joel and Tracy Chapman), poetry (Joy Harjo and Rudyard Kipling), and drama (Shakespeare) for them to adapt into new poems and pieces of visual art.
Holly led a workshop on Dada (again, something we touched on last year) and how we can implement chaos within our writing. We tore up poems and threw random words into a hat, then attempting to rearrange the results to create exciting pieces (or indeed just saying the word and shouting DADA at the top of their voice).

At the end of the session we all contributed to the Dada task to create a group poem, which went down very well in the room.

Our next session isn’t until 5th November but remember that we’ll be going on a group trip to see ‘Delicate’ at Lighthouse on 2nd November. Get your tickets asap! And then in November we’ll be exploring and creating ghost stories in the lead up to Christmas.

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The Missing Farmer/ Blackout Poetry & DADA