Q:What do you get if you gather 70 children from six different schools and ask them to write stories and play drama games?
A:A whole lot of fun!!!
Today, thanks to the wonderful Mrs Blackstone, G & T and English coordinator extraordinaire, 70 children, from 6 different local schools, gathered at Altofts Junior school for a day of writing and drama games. Somehow, they all arrived at the right place and on time (well, almost on time...).
I had the KS1 children in the morning, and so told them that we'd be making up a story about a monkey. That's about as much as I did. The rest was up to them, and how they shone! They named the monkey bananas, decided he was very cheeky, and began to come up with cheeky things that he did. All of which was a great deal of fun. However, when he did one cheeky thing too many, their ultimate revenge plot was fantastic! Shave him whilst he sleeps, catapult him into the Antarctic, and let him freeze or be devoured by Polar Bears!!! Who said children always want happy endings? Not these ones! The calibre of writing and the confidence of the children to formulate their ideas and then put them down on paper was quite something to behold.
All of which then led on to the afternoon session with the KS2 and lower KS3 children. I loved watching the Year 7s. Part cool, yet part loving being allowed to be juniors for one day more, having stepped up and away from the Junior school at the end of the summer term. I think that at that age it's great for children to be allowed to still be children, if only for a day here or there. We've just had our house decorated by a wonderful decorator called David, and he told us that when his eldest granddaughter comes to play with her younger cousins, she joins in with the dolls and the prams, things that in her normal life she's left behind. Hurray for acceptable regression, that's what I say! I'm hoping my three girls will live in that state until they're mid twenties. Boys? Who wants to play with boys? We just want to play pretend tea parties with the teddies. Sadly, that may not be the most realistic of hopes, but still...
The older children wrote a story about Boulder, a enormously fat bird (morbidly obiece, according to one girl - I just loved that spelling of obese!), who loved nothing more than bursting the bins round the back of McDonald's and scoffing his face with mouldy chicken nuggets, old burgers, and greasy fries. Despite warnings from the other animals as to the possible pitfalls, Boulder kept scoffing his greedy face until...
...and at that point I asked them what might follow. And boy! Did they have some ideas! Many of them centred around a grizzly end to Boulder, including him being turned into an 'Ultimate' Big Mac. The children didn't finish writing their stories as we did not have a massivly long session, but how I'm looking forward to reading the finished articles when they've been completed!
It was, quite simply, a brill day. I am loving my job these days. Who'd have guessed it when, 8 years ago, I was measuring smelly, sweaty, overweight miners for overalls. How things can change.
Goodnight Bananas. Goodnight Boulder. May your creativity keep the children captivated today, tomorrow, and as long as it takes them to finish and type up their stories!
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