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

13 July 2024

Posted by Susan L. Edser

Characters

Ali and I are immensely proud of one of our writers, Melody. Her poem, The Voyage of Evolution, written from the perspective of Charles Darwin, has been selected in a competition and will be published in the Young Writer’s anthology. Huge congratulations to her!

Today was the penultimate session before we break for the summer. As we waited for people to arrive, Ali asked the writers their favourite words. There was a rich array, including parallelogram, byzantine, and even a made-up one, ‘eardi’ meaning stupid.

Ali had a magic box with famous characters, such as Hermoine Granger, Darth Vada, and Artful Dodger. We considered ways to describe them, including their appearance, their interests, and who was important to them. Ali wrote this on the flipchart; you can see their work in one of the photos. 

Ali set the brief: Pair up with someone in the room, and your two characters meet at a train station. What happens? So, we had Elsa and Barbie playing the longest game of ‘I Spy’ ever, Willy Wonka and Hermoine at No10, Downing Street and Elsa teasing Goldilocks and calling her ‘Goldi Baldi’, after a bad haircut!

The Junior Writers were then tasked with one of the hardest exercises yet. Ali gave the last few sentences of a story and asked them to finish it. It was challenging, but as always, they did brilliantly. 

Then, it was time for some fun. The Junior Writers got to play Frankensentences (write the first half of a sentence, and the next person completes it), and the Young Writers had a go at Frankenstory (taking it in turn to write paragraphs that follow on from the last person). Needless to say, the sentences and stories ranged wildly, with people combusting, others having social anxiety and even drug-induced delusions. If only we had Oscars to give out, as the narration by one of the boys was award-winning-worthy, sounding uncannily like an old woman.

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