Young Writers - week 4 - Nature Writing [animals & wildlife]

This week we had a special guest assistant, writer & performer, Harley Truslove.

We started with our group check-in, which was going to be animal based to keep with the theme of the week — but instead we decided to go with which Christmas food we are in order to get a festive feeling going!

Claire felt like her week was a selection box, as she had too much going on.
Poppy C’s week was a potato, as it was pretty solid!
Berry & Poppy both agreed that their weeks were like brussel sprouts, as they weren’t the best.
And Harley felt like a tear and share cheesy garlic wreath, as they’d been pulled in all directions.

We then had a check in about what we were reading.

Poppy C is reading “Trash” by Andy Mulligan, and is on the fourth of five parts.
Berry has been reading “The Danger Gang” by Tom Fletcher, and enjoys the main character.
Poppy has been watching Antiques Roadshow!

And in school, we discussed what everyone had been learning:

Poppy C has been writing about summaries of chapters in books
Berry has been writing a persuasive arguments using “Beowulf” as the foundation text, where they are trying to persuade a hero to come and fight Grendel
Poppy has been looking at Greta Thunberg’s arguments and discussing newspaper articles

Then, in order to warm up, we played a game of Zip, Zap, Boing!, where we passed a ball of energy around the room by throwing it at each other.

Last week we did nature writing, so today we are moving onto writing about animals and wildlife. We made a list of literary devices that could help us write our poems:

Alliteration
Simile
Metaphor
Sibilance
Adjectives
Assonance
Onomatopeia

We read the hedgehog poem, which was somewhat panned throughout the group, and then we started to write our own nature poems. Berry wrote about a forgotten caterpillar, Poppy C about a wolf cub trying to find its family, and Poppy wrote about ‘a Sneaky Snail’.

We discussed the idea of eating escargot, which turned into a conversation about evolution and where the earth came from. Claire challenged the group to write a piece about what it was like at the beginning of the universe, using each of the five senses in order to describe what it was like.

(Harley’s addition, some quotes of the day:

“History is different to imagination.”

When discussing if the medieval period was real, “that is HOW you get a programme like Antiques Roadshow.”)

To finish off we played a round of one word story:

‘There was a potato, it went to the antique that appeared in the Antiques Roadshow but it got demolished by the potato that took a picture of something big like a tomato but the tomato didn’t like a brussel sprout. And the unicorn wanted the tomato so the unicorn took the tomato and ate him up! So the potato decided to eat the unicorn, and all the prime minister wanted was to eat tomatoes and unicorns and potatoes. Whilst watching antique tomato and the pig wanted to stare at the lightbulb and watch Peppa Pig, and Postman Pat, and potato died.’

Optional homework for the week was to continue working on what they had started in session, and also to pick their favourite writing piece and bring it to present for the end of term session on Saturday 9th December.

Our blogs

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

Young Writers - week 4 - Nature Writing [animals & wildlife]