Human Thesaurus

For our final two lessons of term, we looked at synonyms. It’s so easy to stick to the language we’re comfortable with… but there are hundreds of thousands of words in English! It seems a shame not to experiment with fresh ones. We began by playing a simple card game. Everyone had a slightly boring core word. These core words included ‘nice’, ‘interesting’, and ‘quiet’. The rest of the cards had intriguing synonyms on them, and were shuffled out among the group. The aim of the game was to match the core words with their synonyms. It was a great opportunity to get the school’s dictionaries and thesauruses out. (When the volunteers were making the cards, we realised just how lazy we’d become with our own language use! We’ve decided to dish out words like ‘pungent’ and ‘gargantuan’ more regularly in our writing.) The second activity of the day was to match two columns of obscure synonyms on a worksheet. As our students paired ‘crimson’ with ‘carmine’, ‘luminous’ with ‘incandescent’, and began to write stories using their new words, all of us were reminded of the suppleness and vividness of English.

In the next lesson, we played a creative writing version of the game ‘Chinese Whispers’. We came up with a long list of sentences with plenty of adjectives and adverbs. (One of them: ‘My favourite food in the world is delicious, smelly, yellow cheese, which you can only buy from the meanest mouse in town’.) Each student in the circle started with one sentence, and changed one word – either using a synonym, or an antonym. They then passed on the sentence to the person next to them, who made another small change. Once we’d gone around the circle, laughing at how much our sentences had – or hadn’t – changed, we started writing stories with our new prompts.

Punctuation Pyramid

We went back to basics over these few weeks, but with a bunch of fun twists. We wanted to get our students refreshing what they’d learnt about grammar and punctuation, and came up with some quirky ways of encouraging them to apply their knowledge. It might feel like these things are about memorising rules and doing repetitive exercises… so we were especially keen to explore how our decisions about grammar and punctuation can totally change the texture of our stories.

We started with the sentence-structure board-game from the last academic year. It was remarkable to see how much more complex our students’ sentences became after only one trip around the board! Once they had a cool sentence, they had the start of a story. Then we brought out three copies of the Ros Wilson Punctuation Pyramid, each one decorated to look like something out of an adventure: an Ancient Egyptian pyramid, a ski slope, a mountain on a lush island. Starting at the top, students slowly added to their stories, with each new sentence using the next – slightly more difficult – punctuation mark.

It may seem like the rules of punctuation limit our chances to be creative. But when we’re speaking, they become gifts. They can be elastic and flexible. The same punctuation mark can have lots of different connotations given the context or tone of voice we use. We played with this idea in the next icebreaker. We had a list of short sentences, each of which used a different punctuation mark – for example, ‘what are you doing?’ and ‘look at that!’. Students then went around the circle putting different inflections on the same sentences.

Our final punctuation writing activity was an unusual challenge. Everyone picked a fragmentary prompt relating to a ghost story – ‘a foggy city’, for example, or ‘a faint scratching sound’. Once they had their prompts, they were given one kind of punctuation: question marks, exclamation marks, ellipses, commas, brackets, quotation marks… Then it was time to write. They could only use their assigned punctuation mark to build up their stories. Of course, there were some common-sense modifications. The student with commas wrote a story that was clause after clause after clause; the student with quotation marks wrote a story fully composed of dialogue. It was difficult, but we were hugely impressed by the way everyone rose to the occasion! It felt like a game or puzzle, in the end, and got some really witty responses: one of our favourite sentences was, quite simply, ‘The End?’.

If You Were an Animal…

We thought we’d introduce our students to different kinds of writing over these couple of weeks. Our first activity grew out of an icebreaker we played, ourselves, during one of our lesson-planning meetings: if you were an animal, what would you be? It wasn’t about what animal you’d choose to be – it was about the animal that best represented your personality. It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer! Of course, the icebreaker reminded us of daemons: one of the main features of our much-loved His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman.

In school, we asked our students to come up with their animals. Then, they split off into pairs to chat about what might happen if their two animals met. We wanted to give everyone a chance to work collaboratively – to encourage one another to use their imaginations, to write together. For pairs who needed somewhere to start, we came up with a list of prompts: Why, how, and where did you meet? Can you describe the setting? How did you feel when you met? Did you like each other – why? What did you say and do? As we came back to the group to share our stories, we were excited to see how many different writing styles our pairs had used: some wrote BBC news reports, some wrote two perspectives on the same scene, some wrote their pieces independently and stitched them together at the end.

Next week, we picked up pretty much where we left off… but our theme was poetry. Volunteers took it in turns to perform sections from some of our favourite animal poems: William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and TS Eliot’s ‘Macavity’. It was fabulous to have the whole group join in on that immortal line: …Macavity’s not there! As they listened, everyone drew what they visualised, paying very close attention to the details in the poems. We then got them thinking about the ways in which writing a poem is different from writing a story. With a set of basic ingredients to help if they got stuck – rhyme, stanzas, a refrain, descriptive language, at least one simile or metaphor – they got into small groups and wrote their own poems about their animals from last week. It was so great to see some budding Blakes in the room!

Icebreakers for a new year

This week saw the return of the Oxford Writing Project to Edward Feild Primary School! A new year and a new group of students meant we began the session with a game of alliterative icebreakers. The challenge is to come up with an alliterative adjective to describe yourself and announce it along with your name. Our students turned out to be ‘tiny,’ ‘excellent,’ and ‘charismatic’ among other things, whilst our volunteers were ‘keen’ and ‘untidy!’

We then went on to briefly speak with our students about what writing means to them. Their feedback was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and we discovered that some of our students even love to write in their spare time.

Our main activity for the session was the creation of a ‘Happiness Jar’ for each of the students. With a busy and stressful year ahead of them, the idea was for the children to create a jar full of happy memories and thoughts that they can add to throughout the year and revisit whenever necessary. Prompts included ‘Write down a good joke,’ ‘Write down a happy memory’ and ‘Who inspires you and why?’ Many of our students’ responses reflected on their summer holidays. We look forward to painting and decorating the jars soon to equal the wonderful memories and stories they contain.

Dear Future Me…

As the academic year draws to a close for both the OWP volunteers and our students, we’ve been feeling nostalgic. The end of the year is always a strange mix of memories, goodbyes, hopes and questions. It’s happy and sad, exciting and anxious, all at the same time. We thought we’d make this the theme of our session for the week. We asked everyone to write a letter about the past year, addressed to themselves in the future. It’s a really interesting concept that has been adapted into a website and a book (‘Letters to My Future Self’). It seemed to make the most sense for us to design a worksheet:

Dear Future Me,

I want you to know about a few things. Year ___ is almost over, and soon it will be the summer holiday. It has been a _____________________ year, full of memories to take forward! It’s important to keep a note of these memories for the future because __________________________________________. When I open this letter again, I think I’ll be_________________________________________________________________.

Lots of love…

Students built upon this exercise by thinking about their answers to some related questions. Here are a few of those questions: What’s one thing from this year that you never want to forget? Describe something you accomplished this year that you are proud of. What do you hope you’ll learn to do next year in school? As we went around the circle, discussing our responses to these – and other – questions, we had a wonderful opportunity to share our experiences and look forward to the year ahead. It’s been an amazing term… bring on the next one!

Sentences: The Building Blocks of Stories

We’re getting really close to the end of the academic year now! With the weather so beautiful and the mood so light, we decided to bring in a new game for our students to play – Sentence-Building Dominoes. These dominoes are great. Each domino has a couple of words on it – one on each side – and is colour-coded according to the part of speech it represents.

Our warm-up activity was to ask the students what the different parts of a sentence are: together, we pooled a list, running through nouns, pronouns, verbs, connectives, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs and punctuation. Then, we started the game. Each student picked a question prompt at random. Here are some of the prompts we came up with:

What did the T-Rex say to the caterpillar?

Describe something really boring.

What happened behind the secret door?

They then used the dominoes to put together answers to the questions. This was one of our favourite sentences:

Q: How would you change the world?

A: I will find smart women.

We were absolutely thrilled to discover we had some game-changing feminists of the future in our classroom!

After everyone had a few sentences, they started writing their stories. They could either pick one of their sentences and develop it, or try to weave all of their sentences together. The gel pens were, as usual, in great demand. With our help, the students came up with some wonderful stories, and enjoyed reading them aloud at the end of the session.

Creating a summer vacation…

We’ve begun working with a new group of Year 5 students, who will be spending the next few weeks doing writing activities related to wild and imaginative ‘summer vacations.’ We’re collecting their work in a class scrapbook to document their creative adventures.

This week, students wrote postcards to family and friends describing imagined trips. They practiced letter-writing skills and mapped stories about a day in their imaginary vacation, which they then had to summarize in short, postcard-length style. They also got to decorate the postcard with an image of the destination.

The students went to many exciting and curious places, from the English seaside to the mountains of South America. The conscise format of a postcard gave the students an opportunity to focus on writing concisely and focusing in on one specific event or activity. Storytelling occurs in many formats, and the postcards demonstrated that you can even tell a story in a single sentence!

Support the Somerville Ghana Library Project

One of our awesome OWP volunteers is helping to fundraise for a library in Ghana! Here’s the story…

Somerville Ghana Library Project

         In 2003 a group of Somerville College students set up the Ghana Library Project in the Cape Coast, Ghana, funding ‘Molly’s Library’, a free and essential educational and social resource used by hundreds of adults and children across the entire community. For over a decade, students have continued to make annual visits to the library and to raise funds covering the rent of the building and the wages of the librarians.

However, the building used for over a decade is now no longer available to rent, and while Molly, who runs the library, has done her best to relocate to a temporary location, the space just isn’t suitable. Molly’s Library needs our support now more than ever, so that this vital resource at the heart of the community is not lost.

Somerville students, as well as fundraising through various events in college, have set up a crowdfunding website to raise funds for the construction of a new library, along with additional resources. It was launched on May 18th, and so far, two weeks in, the crowdfunding has been a success, exceeding the minimum target of £6000. However, with one week to go, in order to truly make the project a success and to secure the future of Molly’s Library, they need the help of more donors to reach the target of £9000.

Please consider supporting Molly’s Library by donating to the Somerville Ghana Library Project crowdfunding page via the link below. You can find lots more information on the crowdfunding page, and on the project’s social media pages. Please help to keep Molly’s Library alive for the community. Thank you!

 

Library Project Crowdfunding Page: https://somerville.hubbub.net/p/ghanalibraryproject

Website: http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/2637/all/1/Somerville_Ghana_Library_Project.aspx

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/somervillecollegeghanalibraryproject

Instagram: https://instagram.com/somervilleghanalibrary/

 

Articulate!

This week, we brought Articulate For Kids to school. Our students had a great time working with their teams and racing around the board. Each student had a few chances to lead their team, coming up with quick and clear ways of describing particular objects, places, people, actions and more. They were really keen to help one another and it was a photo-finish at the end!

After we’d finished the game, we asked the class to do a writing activity. They each took a card from the deck and came up with a sentence – the more absurd and creative the better – using all of the words listed. When they’d finished their first sentences, they moved onto the next card, and the next, and the next, until we had a stack of wacky mini-stories.

This was a fantastic session that emphasised fun, silliness and group-work – a good way to wrap things up before the half term holidays.