by | May 18, 2012

Poetry Judging

I spent the yesterday morning judging poetry at St Anne’s church in Limehouse. On arrival at this magnificent building I was presented with the daunting task of reading through 130 poems from seven different year groups (reception all the way to year 6) in five different schools all about the Queen’s Jubilee. The children were tasked with creating a poem of 60 words (one word for each year of The Queen’s reign) the pieces demonstrated a wonderful variety in approaches to this remit. We had poems written on flags, portraits of the Queen and even bejeweled poems. The quality was outstanding with students using similes, metaphors and rhyme aplenty – some even managing to find a rhyme to go with Corgies!!! Her Majesty will be pleased to know that she is ‘bold’ and not ‘old’ and ‘very caring’!

This was good practice for another competition I’m currently involved in with The Discover Centre and The Legacy List . Over the last few weeks I have been visiting schools all over East London and running them through sessions on how to create shape poems based on images of the Olympic Park including: The Olympic Stadium, the Arcelormittal Orbit, The Velodrome and the Aquatics Centre. The technique I demonstrate to the students has proved very successful in creating a wonderful finished product.

Here’s the example I created for the competition – mine’s based on Big Ben and not The Olympic Park Images to avoid any temptation of copying!

Big Ben behind you
A bell as large as a home
sways in this timepiece of ticking tradition.
Twelve expressions on its four faces,
hands tracing the routes of our dates.
The beige of age,
leaning proud as it poses for pictures
clad in smart pinstripe,
dressed to impress.
London autumn afternoons chime,
you in your wooly hat.
London summer evening ring,
you in that dress – as the clock sings.

Students have been extremely enthused by the concept of creating poems based on these images, imagining that they are cycling around the Velodrome or making their way to the top of the Orbit. I can’t wait until the closing date when I get to appreciate their artistic efforts and choose the 12 winners.

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Filed under Childrens poetry, Creativity, On writing, Poetry, Schools workshops, Workshop ideas

by | January 13, 2012

The Writer’s Notebook

“Keep a notebook” that’s what they tell you at the writers classes – “keep a notebook and write everyday” good advice, I’m not denying that it is good advice and that a writer, no matter what their chosen form, should keep a notebook. But what happens to those notebooks? I’ll tell you what happens! They end up in a box, on a shelf, under a bed, by the side of a bed, in a box labelled stuff in an attic only accessible by a ladder you lost years before so that now the notebooks are tossed up there with abandon!!! From here they quickly and certainly become forgotten.

My notebooks now fill a large shelf – I have notebooks stretching back eleven years and I have no idea what’s in them! So the other day I took it upon myself to read through some and rediscovered some ideas, ideas that had been trapped between those tight-lipped pages. I’m sure I’m not alone – hands up if you have a mass of notebooks propping something up in your house. Now here’s what I suggest you do – read through your old notebooks, pull out those forgotten gems. I intend to try and get through at least one a month and am determined to not let future notebooks become dumping grounds. I shall make it a new habit to review all notebooks once complete and maybe even number the pages and draw up a contents page on the front via a big fluorescent sticker.

Ideas, good ones are rare beasts and need to be carefully stored – it’s no good making all that effort to note down that fabulous plot in the middle of the night if you’re just going to sling it into a black hole dolled up as a book – I wonder how many great ideas are lost out there in notebooks waiting for the whimsy of an over-eager de-cluttering session to send them forever to the landfill! Errrrrrrrrr!!!!!

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by | January 8, 2012

Don’t forget your dictionary

ImageWhen I was still at school my grandmother gave me her thesaurus/dictionary, it had seen better days and a large section of ‘C’ was apparently never printed in the book but nevertheless this modest tomb fuelled a love for writing. I was instantly enamoured with the pronunciation guide learning all the exotic symbols and the sounds they represented – ‘O’ as in POT. 

I know that at some point the spine fell off that great book and it was discarded. Years later I regret that moment of hasty de-cluttering and wish I still had the book that filled so many of my school day evenings, spineless or not. I now have several stand alone dictionaries and thesauruses but I rarely use them! today I noticed that I almost entirely use online reference tools often having several tabs open at a time as I search for mouth-watering words with the yearned for rhyme, meter or stress. These free online resources are wonderful and so immediate offering up options for synonyms, antonyms, near rhymes and even a button to hear the word being spoken! However I do feel a small pang of sorrow for my poor books – gathering dust on the shelves, every year growing less up to date without their entries for “retweet”, “cyberbulling” and “OMG”. What I miss most is the random flicking that you can do with a physical book – I would regularly turn to random pages looking for words I hadn’t come across before. I’m sure there are more high tech ways of having a similar experience today, word of the day emails and the like, but its not the same as pressing your thumb against the pages and watching them blur until a spread falls open to reveal its delights. No doubt I am being a bit rose-tinted about all of this and I certainly won’t be giving up my online reference tools – but I think I may remember to press my thumb to the pages of the physical ones every now and then and see what treasures pop out.

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by | January 4, 2012

Creatively re-fuelled

When I was a wee boy I went on a photography course offered by the local youth centre – my memory is normally like a sieve and much of my school days are blurs, mainly around break and lunchtimes but this course I remember in vivid detail. I remember going to the Wandle river and photographing the signs hanging from the wire fences with black and white film I remember returning to The Training and Resource Centre’s tiny darkroom to develop the prints. I recall the excitement a of watching the images emerge and the vinegary smell of the chemicals.

I’ve continued to take photos but mainly whilst travelling or on the very sunday odd whim. This last couple of weeks however I have found my self obsessed, digging out my old Minolta SLR and taking photos on film!!! As well as digital and last week I came across some instructions for shooting water drops and for a whole day I was lost in watery bliss watching a paper cup drip into a sink, oh for simple pleasures.

Too often I find our hobbies get pushed to the sides, ironically – especially for those of us fortunate enough to do something we love. Often our job, even if it is artistic in nature, can force us into habits and have us forgetting the child-like joy that originally attracted us.

I feel great for having re-discovered my joy in photography and am going to make it my mission to not be a stranger to it for so long again – apart from anything else I feel that it has had a direct impact on me creatively as a whole – writing is by its nature a very wordy pursuit and it was nice to allow myself the indulgence of running free in an entirely visual medium.

See all the photos here

What are your forgotten hobbies?

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by | February 15, 2011

Boys reading and writing through game play

I find many things can be inspirations for writing and workshop exercises from great works of art to beautiful music – but I did not expect a game played at a New Year’s Eve party to be such a fantastic inspiration for an exercise that can get reluctant readers and writers doing those very things.

Before the clock struck twelve on New Years Eve our lovely hosts got us playing a game known as “Put it back” where teams write celebrity or well known names (i.e cartoon characters, computer game characters, figures from history etc) on pieces of paper and place them, folded, into a hat. Teams then elect a member to pick a name from the hat and to describe the person on the piece of paper without saying their name. Each team gets a minute to try and guess as many names as possible from their elected team member’s, often strange, descriptions.the process then repeats each round has a different challenge as follows….

Round 1 – The elected member must describe the person using as many words as they like but, obviously, never using the actual name of the person.

Round 2 – The elected member can use only three words to describe the person – (never the actual name ! I’m sure you get the idea)

Round 3 – The elected member can use only one word.

Round 4 – The elected member can use only actions.

I tried this game for the first time last week on a a great project I’m working on where the focus is on ‘The Impact of Creativity on Boy’s Learning’. The teachers and I quickly found that the boys were happy to write names down on scraps of paper to put into the hat and to read the names when it was their time to describe/enact for their team. If they needed help we would provide it via a whisper, so that their team couldn’t hear!

By the end of the session the boys did not want to leave and were eager to continue the game. Given the boys enthusiasm, we thought we should repeat the exercise and push the amount of reading and writing that they do during the game. This week we brought in pictures of celebrities and cartoon characters etc as well as some faces that they might not know, such as famous explorers, painters and scientists.

At the start of the game we went through all of the images as a group and filled in any gaps in their knowledge, asking them how they would describe each image in the game, as we did this we suggested (we never made it compulsory) that they note down what they say in order to help them during the game. All of the boys took notes in some shape or form, some elected to draw symbols to help them if they were unable to spell the words they needed.

It was great to see how much writing could be generated through this simple game. There is the potential to hang a lot of ‘learning’ off of it as well – the images could be characters from a book they are reading, or faces from history! All of the boys used their notes and had great fun competing in their teams. I will definitely use this exercise in future workshops and think I may try to add a forth round where they must mold the person out of dough. If you give this exercise a try in your classroom or workshop let me know how it goes.

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by | January 12, 2011

What’s the SOUND Mr Wolf

This is a game developed with teachers at Thomas A Beckett school in Worthing. The focus is sounding out letter sounds. The game is similar to the original with a “Grandmother’s footsteps twist” One child – The Wolf stands at one end of the playground with her back turned, the rest of the children group at the other end and call out together “WHAT’S THE SOUND MR WOLF” To which Mr wolf will reply with a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) word such as pot, dog, log, mum, dad etc (we had an adult accompany the wolf holding a sheet full of CVC words from which the child could choose) The group of children must then move towards the wolf sounding out the letters of the word so for LOG they would say the sounds “L” – “O” – “G” at any point the wolf can turn around, if she does so the other children must freeze because if the wolf sees them moving they must return to the back of the playground. Once the wolf has turned her back again the children will once again ask “WHAT’S THE SOUND MR WOLF” and the process repeats. At any point the wolf can shout out “Dinner Time” at which point the other children must flee the chasing wolf to the back of the playground (home). If a child manages to tag the wolf they become the wolf themselves! If the wolf catches a child – that child will become a wolf – this keeps the game moving and ensures everyone gets a go – be they bad at fleeing or great at sneaking!

The year 1 children we were working with took to this game very quickly and got very competitive about it. We saw children who would normally cringe away from reading or sounding out doing these activities with enjoyment as they focused on enjoying the game.

Image Credit – earth_voyager

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by | January 4, 2011

How to write a play?????

A question that is often asked of playwrights is “Do you plan your play or do you just write?” I am sure there as many responses to this question as there are writers – but since this was asked of me recently I thought I’d give you my tuppence worth.

When I first started out I definitely did not plan – I enjoyed and still do enjoy the thrill of going full steam ahead into a piece of writing and the excitement of not knowing where you’ll end up. However there are issues with this technique, it is no friend of plot! As I would often discover halfway through when the original steam had run out and I was left wondering “What happens now?”

I always had an aversion to planning, feeling that it would somehow stultify the writing process. What I have since found, however, is that when done correctly, planning can enhance the discovery of the unknown. I’m by no means a planning purist but I certainly need an outline before I can write a scene and what I have found is that as a scene develops the plan will change!

My studio is littered with index cards and various means of attaching them to things, from wires, to bull dog clips to blu tac to pins. I start with a rough outline of how the play will develop following the main “wants” of the characters and track how these “wants” play out along with any sub-plots. Invariably I find that as each scene that is written it changes the plan both ahead of it and behind it often drastically so! You may ask “What’s the point of a plan if its going to change” to which I would say that the plan allows you the ability to change and gets you to a point where you can confidently make that change.

I am currently researching the cultural history of the city for a play that will go into R&D (Research and Development) later this month. I have created several plans for this piece each building on the last but none were quite right until the scenes started to take shape. It is at this crucial point that the theory becomes reality, would that character do that thing? Is that high point really a high point when played out? Is there something more interesting that could be done? Does the character say something you did not expect?

In my process the play only becomes real once the scenes take ownership of the plan and divert it to their own course, come alive and tell you what they need and want. To my pleasure I have found that this dual way of working provides all the thrill that originally got me into writing in the first place and adds to it a focus, a direction. It is tantamount to the difference between reading a guide book and actually visiting a place – without the guide book you wouldn’t know where to go, but until you go there you won’t know what’s going to happen!

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