03 February 2024

Posted by Sukie & Claire

Junior Writers - Week 4 (The Art of Writing) - Non-Fiction

Hi Writers!

In this week’s workshop we explored a new arena: non-fiction!

During our check-in we described our weeks as a kind of reptile.

 Marissa described her week as like a snake, slow and winding

 Hamish’s week was an African rock python – he’d wanted to laze around and eat lots

 Evan said his week was like a gecko, full of ups and downs

 Indie described her week as a snake too – very long!

 Claire’s week was a crocodile, moving around a lot and feeling very old

 Sukie said their week was like a boa constrictor after it’s eaten – slow and sluggish

In our reading check-in we found out we’ve mostly been continuing our books from last week

 Indie: ‘Varjak Paw’ & ‘Christmasaurus and the Naughty List’

 Marissa: finished Mistletoe & Murder and now onto ‘The School For Good and Evil’ and ‘Dork Diaries’

 Hamish: ‘Big Nate’

 Evan: ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’

 Sukie: planning to finally read ‘Good Omens’

 Claire: ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ & ‘The Northern Lights’

We discussed the different kinds of non-fiction, including instructional, historical, scientific,

informational, news, biography, Atlas and autobiography, before playing a round of Storyonics, a

collaborative storytelling game where we each took it in turns to tell the next part of the story based

on the pictures on the flashcards we drew.

Our collaborative story was:

Fred woke up and ate a banana for breakfast before putting on his helmet and riding his motorbike

all the way to the ski resort. He had planned to have a fun day skiing, but crashed into a tree and

broke his arm. Sadly, he returned home.

The next morning, he received a letter in the post. It was from his cousin Hamish, from Scotland.

Hamish wrote with great excitement to say that Big Ben had been stolen, and that Tutankhamen was

the prime suspect!

Unfortunately, some of the snow that Fred had been immersed in the day before had held a terrible

poison, and he died later that morning.

Meanwhile, over at the ski resort, a great dinosaur had appeared, and ate all of the leaves off the

tree Fred had crashed into. A wasp flew around it, trying to sting it, but the dinosaur smacked it with

its tail and sent the wasp flying all the way through the window of Fred’s living room. A cowboy

wearing bright pink lipstick swaggered in and attempted to swat the wasp with a stolen police

truncheon. He failed, and made an escape on Fred’s motorbike.

After some time of riding, the cowboy came across a beautiful cathedral and set about smashing its

windows to kill time.

It was then that the heavens opened, and rain began to pour down into the valley like it would never

stop. The river burst its banks and the floodwater rose higher and higher, and eventually the cowboy

decided to take the opportunity to go fishing. However, the water rose faster than he could escape,

and – as he had forgotten his oxygen tank at the house – the cowboy drowned.

His death, however, was shortlived, and he came back to life as a merman. Using his merman magic,

he turned the motorbike into a raft and set up a relaxing hammock under the waves, with a

flowerpot for decoration. But as that floodwater continued rising, it soon reached the poisoned snow

of the ski resort, and the poisons came churning down into the water and killed anyone it touched,

including the cowboy merman.

Ruby, a nearby mermaid, spotted the wave of death approaching and clambered out of the water

onto a boat to escape. Using her trusty binoculars, she saw a faraway desert island with a sign on it

showing ‘X’ to mark the spot where buried treasure might be found. But at that very moment, the

wasp that had narrowly escaped Fred’s submerged living room flew down the boat’s chimney and

stung Ruby on the head. She fell to the deck and was caught in a trap laid by the mayor of the sunken

village. He tied her up and threw her in a sack, but as they struggled, the poison slowly ate a hole in

the hull of the ship and sunk them all. The wasp alone survived.

What an adventure!

We took some time to read some examples of non-fiction books and each shared something

interesting we’d learned:

 Evan read ‘First Book of Mammals’ and found out that shrews have poison in their spit

 Indie read ‘The Villainous Victorians’ and discovered that crime was punished very harshly in

the Victorian era

 Marissa read ‘Night Animals’ and learned about the frogmouth bird, able to camouflage

itself using its patterned feathers, and the elephant hawk moth that hides itself on yellow,

pink and green plants that match its colour

 Hamish read ‘Who was the Girl Warrior of France?’ and learned about war

 Claire read ‘100 Facts to Save the Earth’ and found out that in a single day a cow can unleash

500 litres of methane gas – enough to fill 100 balloons!

 Sukie read ‘The Big Book of the UK’ and learned about a cave in North Yorkshire that is so big

someone once tried to fly a hot air balloon inside it

We spent some time considering what we would each like to write about if we were to write a non-

fiction piece

 Evan: electricity

 Hamish: how to draw a Frogbert

 Indie: how to draw a squishmallow

Before closing the session, we played one more round of Storyonics, this time about a cow who

played the drums and was struck by lightning, a standoff between cops and pirates, and a troll

whose cave was invaded by everyone all at once!

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone next week for our Poetry session!

Don’t forget, the Shaftesbury Tales writing competition has opened! Open to writers living in Dorset

(so that’s at least some of you!), it has age categories of 11 & under; 12-16; 17-19; 25 & under, and

‘open to all’. It’s a community project with a procession from Corfe to Shaftesbury, performing the

tales of people living in the Dark Ages in villages along the route. Please do spread the word and

submit something.

if you are looking for some extra eyes on your work, do come along to the Junior

(7-11) & Young (11-14) Writer workshops at Forest Arts, New Milton. Just as a reminder, we run on

Saturday mornings (09:30 for Junior Writers and 11:30 for Young Writers) and you can sign up by

contacting the Forest Arts Centre directly, or come along and we can add you to the list!

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Junior Writers - Week 4 (The Art of Writing) - Non-Fiction