Creative Writing

This week we published our anthology!!

The big news this week is the publication of our anthology, The World You Gave Us! It was written over the course of a year by young people who attend after school or Zoom writing clubs with Chasing Driftwood, and contains poetry, flash fiction, short stories and creative non-fiction. The children were so amazing in putting this together that we are already onto our next project which we hope to publish in October! Grab your copy of The World You Gave Us on the link below!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: We started with poetry prompts today, aimed at creating poems based on their current ‘town project’ stories. They could also write any poem they wanted. We had various poetry starters to get ideas flowing and we also looked at how to write limericks. Great responses from everyone then onto making more progress on the town stories!

Monday CJS Club: They had the option of poetry prompts or carrying on with their town stories. Some are now starting to type their stories up on the laptop, which is amazing to see. This project is already coming together so nicely! Well done to all.

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: Great responses in this club to the poetry prompts. Most decided to write poems based on their town ideas. We are saving lots of these to add to the book! More progress on town stories too!

Bransgore Primary Club: Progress on town stories with one now completed, edited and typed up and another started on the laptop, while everyone else involved in the project wrote more of their stories.

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: Mostly working on town stories today but also one member of the group wrote the end of a long collaborative story started a year ago in this club! They have all taken turns writing it over a year and it is finally finished! Lots of editing to do now, but wow! What commitment!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Club: Half the group decided to concentrate on town story progress and half decided to write poems based on their stories or to go in their stories. These were fantastic!!

Wednesday CJS Club: There was a bit of poetry going on but most wanted to make more progress on their town stories. Another one was finished and started to be typed up, and a few more are creeping towards the finish line!

What did we get up to this week? Battle scenes and Minecraft stories for Zoom clubs, recipes and spells for school clubs!

Here is where you will find a weekly summary of everything we have done in our creative writing clubs this week. Simply scroll down to the day your child attends a club to find out what they got up to!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: This week we are looking at battle scenes! We have already worked on pacing, as well as how to write an action scene, so this week we are tying all our knowledge up and writing battle scenes! These can involve small, one on one battles, or epic battles! We discussed several tips for writing battle scenes, such as making it clear when, where and why it is happening, ensuring we allow the battle to have high stakes, allowing the action to rise and fall, and making sure we consider the physical and emotional impact on the characters. There were some prompt choices to get them going and we had some amazing responses, as well as progress on on-going stories that needed a battle scene!

Monday CJS Club: Today we had a go at either writing silly/crazy recipes or magic spells! The idea was to create a list of both ingredients and the method. They could use pictures to help them come up with ideas. Here are a few examples of their work!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: Some great work tackling battle scenes today, well done everyone. We also discussed the progress of the now finished group story and the editing process that’s begun. More on that soon!

Bransgore C of E Primary: recipes and spells today at Bransgore! We had a lovely mix of real recipes (I love the idea of the mug cake!) crazy/silly recipes, and spells for conjuring up all sorts of magic, such as making dogs talk, creating frogs, making dragons and more! Well done everyone! Here are a few examples.

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: Incredibly work from this dedicated bunch today! All tackled the battle scene prompts after listening to the tips and advice on how to write such a scene. Some of the pieces of work were also able to progress on-going stories. I was extremely impressed with this group today!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Club: The younger group asked to do Minecraft stories a few weeks ago, and what a fab idea! We kicked this off today by reminding ourselves that planning will help keep us on track. We quickly ran through what a story needs, ie. characters, setting, plot and theme/genre and I encouraged them to do a bit of a plan before starting. Everyone seemed very excited to tackle their own Minecraft story and one member of the group proudly exclaimed that she’d never written so much before! Wonderful ideas and a great work ethic today!

Wednesday CJS Club: Back to recipes and spells for the school club today. They really got stuck into this and we had real recipes for chicken chow mien, plus silly/crazy ones for flower soup, spells for making a unicorn, spells for creating an amazing book and much more. Well done everyone, we had a lot of fun! Here are just a few examples.