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

17 September 2024

Posted by Harley Truslove

Love Hearts & Book Ciphers

It’s the start of the autumn term! Our writers were back in full force with some fill-in fun, which had the protagonists experiencing more than one ghostly encounter as well as cheese trousers and the British horror of tea going cold. 


After we were done, Ali set our writers a book cipher solving task, using some of her novels as the key. Our writers had to decode a series of instructions using the page, line, word hints they were given; then they needed to fulfil the instructions they decoded. People were drawing spiders, revealing embarrassing secrets, and sharing their middle names. At the end everyone had grabbed a box from the windowsill and opened them to reveal…


Love Hearts!


The sweeties. The note inside our boxes challenged our writers to use the words on the sweets to write a poem or start of a story, a thought provoking exercise seeing as some of them were emojis (everyone agreed the effort put into manufacturing Love Hearts had gone downhill over the years). Our writers gave us women who had been kidnapped, acrostic love poems, and accidental haikus. 


After a quick discussion about what we wanted to do this term, we got back into the cipher swing with Ali asking our writers to start a story which has characters uncovering a cipher. Our writers had us encounter girls in a boarding school, a cipher carved into a body, and crying about spilt milk…


To end, we voted on the best drawn spider, and the winner was given a certificate to applaud their efforts.

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