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27 January 2024

Posted by Rohan Gotobed & Holly Spillar

Mood Boards and Postcards from Space

Saturday 27th January 2024


Juniors:


Next week we will be starting our new competition for Treehouse Theatre. With this in mind I thought this week the writers deserved a little break and so we did some moodboards. 

The writers have been doing a lot over the last 2 weeks with our Quentin Blake project and all the writing they did for our Moomins Stories last week. So today was a lovely social session which allowed our new members to learn about our talented group and make some new friends. 


I have popped some mood boards below and am excited for the writers ideas when we launch next weeks competition!





Young Writers:


After last week’s successful movie-pitching workshop, we continued with our ‘Space’ theme for the term, embarking on a series of writing challenges.


First up, our writers had to write a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from a far flung planet. Who would they send their message to? And was the planet heavenly, or hellish? Sure enough, we had a wonderful mix of both – postcards from 1984-influenced colonies, a dusty Mars base, planets where trees were a surreal mixture of colours, and even where they were inspired by gherkins and pickles! 


Our next challenge – the young writers had to choose three random letters (from the alphabet). Their mission was to write a stream-of-consciousness description of an astronaut being launched into space, but they weren’t allowed to use any of the three letters they’d selected. This was a slightly unfair challenge, as some writers had it easier than others (one person had chose A and E as two of their letters which was trickier than someone who’d chose X-Y-Z). The writers seemed to enjoy this challenge as they had to be more careful about which words they used. There were some really interesting monologues where writers had leaned into the poetry of it.


Our third challenge was inspired by a famous movie tagline – ‘In space, no one can hear you scream.’ Our writers had fifteen minutes to write whatever they wanted, but they had to include that line somehow. What followed was a series of unsettling and terrifying stories about monsters and aliens and shadows in the universe. Well done!


Finally, as we still had a bit of time at the end of the session, we went back to our second challenge and repeated it with another twist – this time the young writers had to write about their astronaut returning to Earth, but they could only use words that featured their selected letters. Of course, the results were wonderfully clever.

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