21 Aug Summer Reading Challenge Fun!
It’s Summer Reading Challenge time! And I was delighted to be asked to run a couple of writing workshops at the fabulous Hayridge Centre in Cullompton.
The children all loved Sarah McIntyre’s weird and wonderful creatures from the ‘Mythical Maze’ theme of this year’s SRC, so for the workshop for 4-7 year olds, we went for a monstery theme.
First we created our own monster. Introducing the weird, the wonderful, the very spotty…..
Henry Oliver Measlepop the Hairy Monster!
Who had a rather unfortunate problem….
Using some fabulous ideas, the children worked out their own story. It turned out Henry Oliver Measlepop (HOM, for sanity’s sake) had a terrible case of the dreaded Monsterpox on the very day of The Big Race at his monster school.
Between them, the children worked out a solution to his problem (involving his mum, a parcel containing medicine and a rather nifty sprint to school) and it all ended up happily in the end.
A big thank you and well done to all the children who worked so hard and came up with such fabulous ideas!
The next workshop was for 8 years+. We decided to look at ‘what happened next’ in fairy tales and I was secretly rather chuffed that one of the children suggested using ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ (one of my favourites).
After thinking about the character of the giant….
…we moved on to think about my three favourite words in storymaking: ‘but what if?’ What if the giant had survived the fall from the beanstalk? Or had just been knocked out when everyone thought he was dead? What would happen next in the story?
And so followed some fabulous ideas and suggestions, involving a shrinking giant, a clever Jack who strikes a deal with the giant, and an impressive, if somewhat graphic, explanation of what happens when a tiny, erstwhile giant swallows a magic bean!
The children worked so hard and came up with absolutely brilliant ideas…
and it was a real pleasure to be involved in these workshops. So a big thank you to all the children for a really fun morning, to Hayridge Centre staff for inviting me and to Susie Tyler for taking some lovely photographs to remember the morning!