Workshops
Get in touch to organise a free, in-school workshop for your school:
500 Words
Suitable for: KS2 - Up to 16 participants
Course length: 5 to 8 weekly sessions
Session length: 45 to 60 minutes
This workshop prepares writers to enter the BBC's 500 words competition. Each workshop looks at a different aspect of writing fiction including idea generation, character, plotting, setting and "show don’t tell". Through this workshop, over 45 stories from participants have been entered with several making it through the first round of judging.
Graphic Novels
Suitable for: KS2 - Up to 10 participants
Course length: 5 to 8 weekly sessions
Session length: 45 to 60 minutes
We examine and dissect what makes a graphic novel. We look at form, plotting, creating covers that hook our readers, character development, character model sheets and settings. This is an ideal workshop for students who have a lot of ideas and are looking for alternative ways of expressing them. You do not need to be a good artist to take part.
Participants create an 8-page graphic novel and receive, positive and constructive feedback from a well known graphic novel publisher.
WorldBuilding
Suitable for: KS2 - Up to 16 participants
Course length: 5 to 8 weekly sessions
Session length: 45 to 60 minutes
Through guided exercises creating maps and notes, participants will create their own fictional worlds. Each world will have a rich and varied history. They will create their own societies and civilisations, events and disasters, flora and fauna, and use it to populate a world in which they can tell a story in any form they want. Participants will create a collection of comic strips, stories or poems set in their world.
Rap Attack
Suitable for: Y5 or Y6 - Whole class or smaller groups
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 60 minutes
This is a crash course in rapping! Participants learn how to perform spoken word to the rhythm of a backing track, how to use end rhymes, internal rhymes, multisyllabic rhymes and slant rhymes. We also learn key ways to create rhymes.
The session is completed with a chance for willing volunteers to perform. No rap experience needed!
Monstrous Poetry
Suitable for: Y1, Y2, Y3, or Y4 - Whole class or smaller groups
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 60 minutes
Participants will discover their own monsters, draw them and use simple metaphors and similes to describe them. It includes experimenting with putting random word combinations together and seeing what meanings fall out. Participants create a poem about our monsters using optional word banks, cards and templates.
At the end it is performance time! Will your monster be silly, serious, scary?
Experimental Poetry
Suitable for: Y2, Y3, Y4, Y5 and Y6 - Up to 20 participants
Course length: 5 to 10 weekly sessions
Session length: 45 to 60 minutes
Participants discover creativity through exploring and experimenting with text to create poems. This includes cut-up, erasure, haikus written on physical objects, formal constraints and text remixing. Participants have a chance to try tactile, hands-on ways of creating poems. I also try to align the course with an active poetry competition so that we are able to have a definitive goal to work towards.
Certain sessions in this course work very well as one-off workshops.
Dragon Poetry
Suitable for: KS2 - Whole class or smaller groups
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 60 minutes
What would it feel like to meet a dragon? In this session participants will create a unique dragon of their own and, through guided exercises, create a first-person poem describing what it feels like to encounter that dragon. Each dragon has a unique aspect of its own that the writer portrays in their poem.
This is an excellent workshop for gently introducing or reinforcing simile and metaphor.
Sports Poetry
Suitable for: KS2 - Whole class or smaller groups
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 60 minutes
How does sport make you feel? How can you share that feeling with others?
This session encourages participants to describe their emotions and their physical sensations as they take part in sport.
Through poetry we can let others know how we feel and express ourselves.
Wild Poetry
Suitable for: Y1, Y2 and Y3 - Whole class or smaller groups
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 60 minutes
Participants take part in a poetry safari to record sightings of wild and wonderful beasts.
Each poet learns about why poetry exists and how we can use it to share moments, experiences, ideas and memories.
Happiness is…
Suitable for: Reception - Up to 15 participants
Course length: 1 session
Session length: 20 minutes
We discuss what a poem is and how we can use poetry to share our emotions with others. After listening to a reading, we write a list poem as a group, sharing what happiness means to us.
Custom workshops
Suitable for: You choose
Course length: You choose
Session length: You choose
We will happily create a workshop for your school, covering whatever topics, themes or forms that you want for your classes. Get in touch to discuss!