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26 November 2022

Posted by Beth McKeeman

Exisiting in an Apocalypse

Junior - 9 Young - 8

How many words can you think of beginning with the letters A P O C A L Y P S and E?

After scratching our brains to think of as many words as possible, we finally put all the letters together into apocalypse, which was the theme of the week.

If something world-endingly bad happened on Pilutkeymon Island, what would we do?

We thought about what weapons we might have, such as rifles, crutches, mace, shovels, arrows and crossbows, daggers, coconuts, chainsaws, frying pans and bazookas.

But maybe some of our creatures, such as the Liondeer, deerdinosaur, cat koala, pellyparrot, doggle, ospreys, skunkadile and girff, are less fighters and more fleers. They might take shelter across the island. Good locations were underneath a rock, in the forest, in the water, under the pink tree, in a cave on Mystic Mountain or at Pioneers Peak.

We then each wrote our apocalypse stories.

In Young Writers we wrote about our weeks by progressing through the alphabet to start each sentence i.e. sentence 1 would begin A, sentence 2 would begin with B, and so on.

Looking back at our weeks, we listed activities that people could take part in or situations they could find themselves in such as losing a shoe, breaking a phone, going horse riding, having a sleepover.

To test the worlds we have spent the term building, we were going to put our characters in one of these mundane situations completely unconnected to any overarching plot line and see if they could exist in the world doing this mundane activity. To give an example of this, we watched one of the microstores from Avatar: The Last Airbender, where two characters go to the spa for the day (click here to watch). Their spa day is completely unrelated to the storyline and doesn’t drive any plot forward, but does show the world they live in and how realised the world concept is.

To end the session, we collaborative created a character, with each of his attributes having an action. He had a funny shaped head, a peculiar way of walking, two fingers, no eyes, a nose made out of glass, good ears, big hands, chicken wings, burnt toes and has legs made out of noses. He likes the smell of bread, is terrified of carpets, likes eating plants, really really likes oxygen, really really dislikes carbon dioxide, likes spending time in the dar, likes riding horses, hates getting dirty and running and is terrified of him mum.

Can we remember it next week?

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