Poetry Slam Dunk

 

What a ball we've had for Poetry Day Ireland in the Oblate Hall in Inchicore, throwing balls and words around!

Thanks to all in SMGS and in Mercy for being game, to Poetry Ireland for the support and the funding, and to the RTÉ News and Morning Ireland crew for tagging along.

Here is the poem(written by me!) that was read on air.

Reinventing...

The last few months have been many things and one of them was a very steep learning curve and a complete recalibration of how us kids' writers and creatives do our job. Because it's not just sitting at your desk all day and typing or doodling away, it's not just time alone thinking and dreaming and imagining. It's also, of course, getting out there, meeting young readers and writers and their families, their teachers, their librarians, their teddies! 

With 'out there' being essentially out of bounds, we've have to reinvent how we do things. Over the past while, I've been busy experimenting with online workshops (junior book club, toddler time, writing club, even Zoom baby book clubs!), pre-record videos (writing challenges, desincarnated residencies...) and also outdoors events. 

Those are the new ways we'll get to reach out to kids, families, schools, libraries and festival goers for the next while. It's been intense and intensive and, sometimes, very enjoyable!

So, teachers, librarians, festival programmers, if you want to keep young readers and writers engaged, chat to a creative today, they'll have come up with something! (such as my Poetry Treasure Hunt or my Ninja Writer's Workout, more here)

The Whole Wide World Fits in My Head

It really does! Check out the amazing work done by Fourth Class as part of this project with illustrator Tarsila Kruse and yours truly.

Well done, team!

Picture this!

We had a brilliant time in First Class flexing our narrative muscles before the Easter break. We looked at ways to find ideas for new stories and got a lot of help from paintings by Mary Swanzy, Hokusai and others.

We asked lots of questions about each image, wondering what was going on, who were the people in the pictures, what they were doing, what they were saying, feeling, what happened just before, what might happen next and so on. That got us (sneakily) thinking about character, plot, setting and all the things you need to build a story. 

As for the answers to these questions… we made them up, using clues from the paintings, so that they were all right!

Then we put everything together in order and created a collective story with a little help from Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles. Who lives there? Where are they now? Will they come back? Why is it all green behind the window? Is the house in a cornfield or a jungle? Or is it that the house is tiny and it's only normal grass growing outside?... 

Here is our story, enjoy! (By the way, First Class, we're going to need a title!)

Two magic people lived in a tiny house. Their job was to get rid of human people’s rubbish. 

But one day, they got rubbish that was really dangerous to both humans and fairies: a jar of killer bugs! 

So they went off to get rid of it as far away from everyone as they could. But outside in the tall grass they were attacked by a giant poisonous snake that swallowed them up!

Inside the snake’s tummy, they opened up the jar. The killer bugs started eating the snake from the inside out. The snake died and the bugs too (because of the poison in the snake’s blood). 

They climbed out of the snake and went home, determined to have a word with the humans about producing such dangerous rubbish in the first place…

Everyone got to write their own picture-inspired story after that, and to work on the tricky issue of structure or story map. That's how we realised that some plans are better than others, with some being too boring, too simple, too complicated or too what-just-happened-? Finding the right balance is really hard, but this lot really gave it their best and did a great job!

I can't wait to see their finished pieces after the break!

Giants!

I was in Room 2 recently telling the story of Disaster David and chatting with the Junior Infants about giants, disasters and animals. We had a great time creating our very own book and we hope you'll pop in to have a look at it in the class library!