20 April 2024

Posted by Sukie

Junior & Young Writers – Week 1 (Writers’ Inspiration) – Injustice/Unfairness

Hi Writers!

Finally, we’re back from the Easter Holiday! We hope everyone had a fantastic time with lots

of fun in the sun (when it shone).

This week we started our new term, and you know what that means! A whole new set of

themes and workshops to try out. Our theme for this term is: Writers’ Inspiration. Each

week we’ll be working through a different source of inspiration, from beauty to the natural

world. This week’s theme was: injustice/unfairness.

As we had some new faces in Junior Writers, we all took the time to introduce ourselves

and share what we’ve been reading over the holidays.

 Indie: ‘The Great Mouse Plot’ and ‘The Fantastic Mr Fox’

 Evelyn: ‘Horrible Histories: The Terrible Tudors’

 Evan: ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’

 Tabitha: ‘Horrible Histories: Edinburgh’

 Claire: ‘The Northern Lights’

 Sukie: ‘The Northern Lights’

We then set our collaborative agreement for the workshops and agreed on three rules:

1. Share respect – both for ourselves and each other. This looks like: no self

diss; no dissing others’ work; listening when others are sharing their work

2. These workshops are not school and there are no teachers or tests – we’re all

here to learn!

3. Have fun and have a go!

We took it in turns to share our favourite writers and check in about our week, describing

them as a kind of cake. We had a battenburg, a Soreen, a Stitch birthday cake and a lemon

drizzle cake!

Next we played one of our favourite games, Buzzy Bees, and shared our writing goals.

Tabitha said she wanted to work on her poetry, while Evan wanted to continue to focus on

his science fiction stories.

We read ‘The Invisible’ together as a great example of writing inspired by injustice – in this

case, poverty.

Our writing exercises for the week were to make a list of different unfair or unjust

experiences we have had, and to write a poem or short story inspired by injustice or

unfairness we ourselves have experienced.

To close the session, we played a round of One Word Story:

One day there was a disaster and Jimmy came to his kitchen. There was a monster

sandwich in the oven in the spaceship, and Jimmy cooked the sandwich for a hamster to

eat.

- - -

In Young Writers we started out with a cake check-in and had a syrup sponge pudding,

witch’s teeth, bread & butter pudding and a mini-egg chocolate bar.

In our reading check-in we had a real variety, from ‘Staying Alive’ poetry anthology to ‘Jolly

Foul Play’, the fourth book in the ever-popular Murder Most Unladylike series.

We played next-level Buzzy Bees, where we had to freeze on an alliterative phrase –two

memorable ones were ‘perfect Poppy’ and ‘charismatic cactus’.

Poppy bravely read us all ‘The Invisible’ and we discussed how it portrayed community as a

force for good.

Everyone took some time to write out a list of unfair things that have happened recently, and

we used our writing time to put those things to words, whether poetry or prose. A literary

outpouring of righteous anger and cries for justice!

Don’t forget: The Winchester Poetry Festival’s Young Poets Competition has opened! The

theme is ‘Our World, Our Planet’, and the task is to write a short poem (no more than 14

lines). This is being organised by Hampshire Cultural Trust, so it is open to anyone living or

studying in Hampshire (that means if your school is in Hampshire you can apply, even if you

live across the border). There are three age categories: 4-7, 8-11 and 11-16, and the

winners will receive a National Book Token as the prize. The closing date is Wednesday 31 st

July at midnight so we will definitely be setting some time aside during the summer term’s

Junior and Young Writers workshops to develop pieces for this competition.

Our Junior and Young Writers groups run every Saturday during term time at the Forest

Arts Centre in New Milton. To sign up, just head to the Forest Arts website (it’s free!). Junior

Writers is for ages 7-10 and runs from 09:30-11:00, and Young Writers is for ages 11-14 and

runs from 11:30-13:00.

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Junior & Young Writers – Week 1 (Writers’ Inspiration) – Injustice/Unfairness