Tag: Characters

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 12th May

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

What did we do this week? Creating characters for our next big writing project!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: This group voted on the event they think our town should experience and worked on their character bios for the short stories we will soon be writing. They also made progress on their own individual writing projects!

Monday CJS club: The last club to vote on the event the town experiences, plus adding their character’s homes to the project book and any suggestions for town names. Some stories have even been started in this group! Here are a few examples of their characters and stories…

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom group: With voting for the town event now over and counted, I was able to reveal to this group that the ‘strange creatures spotted’ option won! This option had the most votes by far so I hope everyone is going to be excited about writing stories for it. All they have to do is ensure their story mentions the town and the event! They can have any other plot they like, or they can make their story about the town and the creatures spotted there.

Tuesday Bransgore Primary School: The children voted for their favourite town name and continued to work on their characters. Some created more bios for their story, some worked on homes for their character and some started planning their stories! Fantastic work! Here are a few examples:

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: We discussed the result of the vote on the event that happens in our town and we voted on a name for the town. They then had options which including adding to their character bios, creating a home for their characters, drawing maps of their part of town or starting to plot their story. Great work everyone!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: This group also voted on the name for our town, and we had a mix of some children working on character bios, some creating homes for their characters, and some starting to plot their stories… Fab!

Wednesday CJS Club: This group also voted on our town name and I can now exclusively reveal that Lakeside View won the vote! Thank you to everyone for making such great suggestions. We had more character work from some and plotting and even starting stories from others! Here are a few examples:

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 28th May

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

What have we been up to this week? Launching a collaborative writing project and starting by creating characters!

Monday

Monday Zoom group: The new collaborative book idea was explained to this group today and voting commenced on four options we have in creating a short story collection together. The idea is everyone will write their own story and will come up with their own character but the stories all have to be connected some way. We did some character work today to get started! The options are:

  1. An OBJECT is passed through the stories and every story must include this object somehow
  2. A SHARED EXPERIENCE on a train – everyone creates a character who then responds to something that happens on a train
  3. A SHARED EXPERIENCE in a town – we collectively create a town and everyone creates their own character, we agree on an event and each character responds to the event
  4. A SHARED LOCATION – everyone creates a character and writes their own story but all the stories must connect with a shared location

Monday CJS club: Voting for the collaborative short story collection idea and character creation! We also had character interviews where the group get to ask the ‘character’s questions in order to get to know them better. As you can see, the bios are wonderful!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom group: After working on character ideas last week, this group got to vote on the collaborative project idea today. They also carried on creating characters, adding back stories and motivation and more. Fantastic. I’m very excited about the characters being created in this group!

Tuesday Bransgore School: This group also voted on the collaborative idea, and started character bios. We had a few ready for interview and will do the rest next week! Here are a few examples:

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom group: Voting for the group project idea and progress on their previous group story, plus creating characters from scratch OR adding more detail via back story, motivation and more…

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom group: This group also got to to vote on the collaborative book idea and then returned to creating characters for it!

Wednesday CJS club: We voted on the collaborative idea, and finished the interviews we started last week! More work on character bios. Here are a few examples:

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 21st May

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What did we get up to this week?

There was no Monday clubs this week due to it being a bank holiday. There was also no club at Bransgore school due to an inset day there. Here is what the rest of us got up to!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 plus Zoom group: For this session, we discussed our group story which is now finished and has has been edited a few times. We discussed changing a bit towards the end that didn’t quite work and once that is done, the story can be added to the anthology all the groups have been working on. Today we also had a writing prompt: From a window. For this, they could write a fictional or non-fiction story, or a poem, describing a view from a window. We also discussed my new idea for another collaborative writing project all the groups will get involved in and this group were really enthusiastic about it!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 plus Zoom group: Similar to the above, we had some discussion over their group story which is drawing to an end but will need editing when finished. I set them the From a Window prompt and also explained my new idea for a short story collection.

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom group: This group had the same prompt and most of them decided to respond to that. They could also carry on with ongoing stories or poems too, and a few of them went with that option. They also seemed keen on my new idea for a big writing project!

Wednesday CJS Club: Today I told the group about my new idea and they had plenty of questions about how it will work. We set the goal for this term of each creating a character and working towards a short story for that character. We talked about simple and complex character bios and everyone started creating one. Towards the end some of them pretended to be their characters and were interviewed by the rest of us!

See you next week where we will have more news on the anthology AND the new book idea!

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 10th March

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What have we been up to this week? Character dynamics, recipes and spells for Zoom clubs and finishing junk journals for the school clubs!

Welcome parents, carers and young writers. Every week I will post here what we have been up to in writing clubs. The clubs are categorised by day so if your child attends a Tuesday club, for example, simply scroll down to Tuesday to see what we covered this week!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: We looked at character dynamics this week – what are they, why are they important and tips for applying them to your story. Once we had discussed character dynamics and gone through the tips and advice, the group had several options for how to try them out. They could write a scene for their own on-going story which showed some character dynamics, or they could write a random scene to practice utilising them, or they could use one of the prompts offered to get going. We had some lovely examples from everyone and it was a great topic to explore!

Monday CJS Club: This week we finished off the wonderfully creative junk journals and the kids took them home. It was lovely to see some children already writing in theirs and I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing how vastly different they all are! A lot of fun was had making these and I hope the young writers make good use of them at home!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: Character dynamics for this group and it was their suggestion to look into the topic, so thank you for that! We had the same discussion and examples of what we mean by character dynamics and we also made progress on the first edit of our finished group story.

Tuesday Bransgore C of E Primary: More finishing and sending home of junk journals! Lots more pages added, using scrap and recycled paper, as well as envelopes, comic pages and so on. It’s been great seeing how inventive they’ve been with this!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: I gave this group a choice of looking at character dynamics or doing recipes/spells like the younger group are doing and they all chose to stick with character dynamics. There was a mixed response of new bits of writing and exploring character dynamics between the characters in their own stories. I’ve known this group since they were a younger group and it’s been amazing and exciting to see how much they have progressed and matured with their writing!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: The younger group have been fantastic, because most weeks they’ve been doing the same topics and work as the older groups and they’ve risen to the challenge every time! I asked them a few weeks ago for some ideas they would like to try and one was writing recipes to share. We decided to tackle this in a few ways. They could share real recipes, which meant including the ingredients and the method in the chat for everyone to see, and they could make up crazy, silly, disgusting recipes too! They obviously had a lot of fun with this! We then talked about how recipes are very similar to spells and potions and some of them moved on to that afterwards. A lot of fun!

Wednesday CJS Club: These guys also finished off their journals and took them home. An amazing variety of journals for all sorts of purposes, they should be very proud of the effort they have put in and the enthusiasm they have shown!