Dolls House

As the Jr Writers entered function room 2 they noticed a little wooden dolls house in the center of the room, filled with little paper notes.

After each carefully selecting a note the writers were informed that the name of the room written on their paper would be the setting for their stories this week.

This week the Junior Writers used a second person story game (in which they were SHRUNK down to the size of dolls and trapped inside a dolls house they needed to escape from) to problem solve and come up with some very atmospheric descriptive writing.

The writers had to craft their way through a second person story by making fate altering choices and completing several writing tasks along the way.

In 2nd person story we discovered

In the dolls house the writers were not alone but accompanied by shadow people who longed to be taken to 'The Big Outside' using their strong imaginations the writers solved the mystery and escaped the dolls house by learning The Big Outside was nothing more than the bedroom of a giant little girl.

Along the way we had some beautiful short stories about making friends with shadow people, dancing at the ballroom, being stuck inside a terrifying room all alone and escaping onto the roof tops. This week the writers really let their imaginations run wild.

17^th June

After last week’s brilliant session, hosted by Alice and Claire, it was time to return to our scheduled programming. Ahead of our trip to see ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ at Lighthouse, we wanted to learn a little more about Jules Verne and his work as a writer.

Warm-Up! Write down:

5 Amazing Places You’d Love to Visit

4 Useless Scientific Inventions

3 Things that are normal to you but would be unimaginable to a Victorian

2 Monsters you might encounter in the wild

1 Travelogue description of an Amazing Place you’ve visited!

Great answers as always – giving us some ideas to help us better understand Jules Verne’s world in the 1800s, as he wrote over forty books imagining adventures all around the world (and indeed, in space) – the steampunkish aesthetic with some stories, and the sort of characters he preferred to explore.

We looked at the opening page from three of his most famous books – ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’,’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’, and ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’. What did they have in common? Tone and pacing (slightly antiquated), an academic/faux non-fiction perspective, while two of the stories were from a third-person perspective.

If the Young Writers were to write their own Jules Verne stories, transporting adventurers to one of the amazing places they’d love to visit, then who would these adventurers be? What monstrous creature might get in their way? What would happen next?

Towards the end of the workshop, we watched a short film inspired by one of Verne’s stories – ‘A Trip to the Moon’ by George Melies (famous for the moon getting a spaceship to the eye). Only fifteen minutes long, it is an absurd and surreal adventure story about a group of astronomers travelling to the moon, fighting aliens, and returning without any bruises. Naturally, it’s very unrealistic in hindsight, but we enjoyed watching it to see what people thought the moon was like in 1902, and how Verne’s stories were seen at the time.

The Young Writers chose a scene from the film – what dialogue would they add to make the story clear?

After the workshop, we went to see Around the World in Eighty Days – a highly entertaining show which the Junior and Young Writers really responded to.

Our blogs

Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

Dolls House