11 May 2024

Posted by Sukie & Claire

Junior & Young Writers – Week 4 (Writers’ Inspiration) – Our Environment

Hi Writers!

This week we worked to the theme of Our Environment.

In our check-ins, we shared our weeks as a type of treasure.

In Junior Writers we had:

 Indie: a crown –lots of jewels, lots to do!

 Hamish: a bird’s egg – disappointingly, not a chocolate egg, but it’s still good to eat

 Evelyn: gold – a good week in which she won a medal!

 Evan: diamonds – studying new, shiny and exciting things in English at school

In our reading check-in, we had a lot of Roald Dahl again (an endless inspiration!):

 Hamish was reading some of his Phoenix Comic storyfile

 Evan was continuing with Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules

 Indie was still enjoying Matthilda and Charlotte’s Web

 Evelyn was continuing with George’s Marvellous Medicine

 Sukie was reading a book on drag and male role models

 Claire was reading All The Men I Never Married

After a quick round of everyone’s favourite game, Buzzy Bees, we sat down to discuss the

different between trash and treasure. Hamish gave us the example of a rotting piece of

orange peel under his car seat as trash, and we learned how even orange peels can help as

fertiliser to help new rainforests grow.

We embarked on an exciting treasure/trash hunt around the room, ferreting out chocolate

coins, feathers, Bounty wrappers and old plane tickets in a mad rush of energy.

We then sat down to sort between our trash and treasure, and discussed why each of us

had sorted our items the way we had. We realised it was very personal, and everyone would

have sorted each other’s quite differently! Evan wowed us all with an excellent master stroke

– having found a coat hanger that appeared from nowhere, he sorted it as treasure because

it said ‘chest’ on it – the perfect thing to keep his treasure in!

Next we plundered the room for words Claire had hidden, before reading an example of

writing about the environment: Once The World Was Perfect by Joy Harjo.

We each took the words we had plundered and the treasure and trash we had found, and

jumped feet-first into our writing exercise for the week – turning them all into a piece of

writing!

Indie wrote a short story about gems being displayed in the Louvre; Evelyn wrote about a

stash of coins, chocolate and feathers that had gone missing; Hamish wrote a Choose Your

Own Adventure about Corky the Screw trying to defend his environment, and Evan also

wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure, set in a futuristic city.

It was great seeing how radically different everyone’s responses were, and how much

everyone’s writing has improved over the last few months. Inspiring stuff!

In Young Writers, we also started out with a check-in:

 Poppy’s week was a cowrie shell, something nice because there had been a bank

holiday and only four days of school

 Berry’s week had been bin juice because it was SATs week! Yuck! But Friday and

the weekend had made up for it in chocolate after new and exciting developments at

home!

 Claire’s week was a Viking hoard, found in a field with a metal detector – discovering

lots of beautiful things, and exploring the past

 Sukie described their week as a garnet – feeling a bit rough and ruddy, but overall

still good!

In our reading check-in, we discovered:

 Poppy had been reading The Boy Lost In The Maze, a book based on the story of

Theseus

 Berry was reading Best Friends Forever – a drama about two best friends in school

 Claire was reading The Lodgers

 Sukie had just re-finished Folk by Zoe Gilbert

After a round of Buzzy Bees, we talked about the difference between an environment and

The Environment, and discussed the difference between trash and treasure. Poppy very

insightfully said that trash is something you don’t want, while treasure is something precious

to you, and those can be the same thing to different people.

The Young Writers embarked on their own treasure hunt, and when they explained why they

had sorted their items as they had, we got some very witty answers! One of our favourites

was ‘with this bus ticket, if it’s the first of May then you can use it to tell the date!’

In our writing exercise, we had some beautiful pieces, and we were very impressed by the

consistent improvement in our Writers! Poppy’s ‘Don’t Forget It All’ was a haunting and

melancholic but hopeful piece, while Berry’s ‘Discard Then Solve’ and ‘How They Came To

Us’ were wonderfully lyrical.

Don’t forget:

Once Upon A Dream is now open, seeking submissions from anyone around the ages of 7-

12 (older or younger welcome too) on the subject of dreams. The closing date is 24th May.

One of our Writers has already submitted, and you can too!

AND:

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 termtime 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 4 (Writers’ Inspiration) – Our Environment