9 Unlucky Things

Today we used - with permission - this brilliant poetry idea from David Groves. I put the poem up on the projector and we read it through together, and pretty much every line got a laugh. 

Then I gave out the worksheets and asked for the children to come up with their own ideas, the more bizarre the better. I said the poems didn't have to rhyme, but I gave them the option of coming up with a rhyming couplet for the end. I suggested as a last line either:

When you realise you've run out of roo--

or

When you realise there's no more room on the pa--

and gave them a selection of useful rhyming words (broom, boom, zoom, tomb, doom, rage, page, rampage, cage, stage, outrage, age, wage).

Favourite lines: 
                              When you go to sharpen your pencil but miss and sharpen your finger

                              When you knock down a whole aisle of cereal in the supermarket

                              When you get run over by Thomas the Tank Engine

                              When it rains knives

                              

Concertina Books 1

It's half term for us, so I'm taking advantage of a bit of prep time to mock up these concertina books for the children to look at when we go back. The dimensions are: A4 sheet bisected lengthwise, stuck together with a small overlap to make one long strip, then folded every 8cm. If there's a little bit of overlap at the end, just strim it off. 

I intend to use these to consider genre.

500 Words

Because I am a judge for the Radio 2 competition, here is a picture of me in my Judge's Hat*.

(*No actual hat required. I just like it.)

In today's Writing Club we talked about entering competitions. The stimulus was the BBC Radio2 500 Words comp, but actually there are competitions running all the time and if you're going to enter one, you might as well enter several. On the BBC link above there are some super tips about how to plot, how to develop character, how to extend your expressive language and how to come up with an original idea in the first place. My own tip would be to make sure you start your story at an exciting moment; don't spend ages describing the background/setting everything up. 

Oh, and have an AMAZING opening line.

NB: Do be aware of "competitions" where everyone who enters gets published and the parents or schools are then asked to pay a considerable chunk for the resulting anthology. There's nothing wrong with that set-up if everyone involved is clear about what's going on. However, if as a parent or teacher you're keen to publish your children's work, I'd recommend Lulu Self Publishing, where you can put together an extremely nice collection for less than a fiver and order as few or as many copies as you like.

Crash-landing on the Moon

Because we were quite a few children down due to illness, I pulled out this emergency NASA exercise which is predominantly about negotiating, with not a lot of writing involved. It's good for expanding vocabulary, though, and could work for a more serious literacy lesson as a launch for a science fiction narrative. You can download the exercise here: NASA Moon Landing. The children worked in groups of 3-4 and everyone was very engaged, and surprised by the actual answers in comparison with their own. Because marking is quite complicated and we didn't have much time, I told them just to award themselves a tick if their answer was two or less away from the real answer: this meant that it was easy to see who'd come closest without the trial of adding everything up.

As a final game I gave them each a pinch of words from this magnetic poetry set and challenged them to make the best sentence they could. This poetry set has come in handy for all sorts and I'd say it's a good investment if you're going to run a writing club. However, you could easily make your own from stiff card.

Postcard from Another Writing Group

It's wonderful to hear from ex-students, and here's someone from an Arvon writing course I ran a few years ago. Her novel will be out on June 4th and I will be raising a glass to it on this blog. 

Congratulations, Vicky, and I'm glad the creative exercises we did helped start you on the road to being published.