Next, we ran Tall Tales and Wonderful Worlds at ArtSway in the New Forest. The morning was spent scouring the gardens for inspiration, looking at the surroundings with a new perspective to gather story ideas - could that murky futuristic looking pond be the model for a galactic alien poison-filled lake? Of course it can!
Students then designed maps to plan out their lands, coming up with unique names like the 'hills of hope' to give a sense of atmosphere to the settings. In the afternoon these places were turned into 3D junk sculptures with yogurt pots, bottle tops, tissue paper and paint helping to make the imaginary settings come to life, the perfect way to help come up with new ideas for poems and stories! Who do you think would live in a world like this?:
More recently we visited Lady St Mary's Middle school in Wareham to lead an assembly. We showed off our wonderful worlds, read poetry and stories and asked everyone for a favourite word or phrase that they heard. We hope they started the day buzzing with ideas and inspiration!
Last week saw us exploring Smuggling Stories with Year 5 of Ferndown Middle School. On monday and tuesday we delved into smuggling history and folklore, focusing on stories from Christchurch and Mudeford. Students got a chance to see (and try on!) traditional outfits from the era, as well as trying their hands at storytelling and discovering how to make descriptions unique and intriguing. On Friday we put their experiences of a school trip to Christchurch to good use, utilising the places they saw, and the characters they could imagine there, to plan their own dangerous and exciting smuggling stories.
We've also been reading some good books. I've been getting hooked by Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight' series, about an ordinary girl who falls in love with a teenage heart-throb vampire. I wasn't too sure whether I'd like these books because of the hype that has surrounded them since the movie came out, but I thought I'd give them a try, and I soon got swept up by the romance and intrigue. We follow Bella as she starts at a new school and then proceeds to get herself into all kinds of trouble. The book is filled with exciting scenes and characters which you want to get to know. The only difficulty I had with it is that at times Bella can be quite irritating - she is annoyingly slow on the up-take and is a bit one dimensional, as though she is just a pawn to keep the story going. But most of the time her innocent ignorance can be overlooked when their are other characters to interest me, like Edward and his family - vampires that don't drink human blood (if they can help it...)That's all for now, let us know what you've been doing or reading, and don't forget to enter our poetry competition and check out our summer holiday courses (all on the website).
Bye!
Jennifer and Rosemary
