Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 17th March

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.

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 10th March

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!