Over the spring I’ve had the great privilege of going into some of my local primary schools to give taster poetry workshops. I worked with children from years 1-6 and with poems about wildlife, emotions and fun. We moved, we drew things, we worked together and on our own; we shared, we experimented, we used our bodies and our minds, and we learned things. I want to share here two of the things I learned.
The fourth R – Resilience. When I was a child there was a truism that the most important thing in education was the 3 Rs – Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (say it out loud and it makes more sense!) Many children love reading and writing – but research by the National Literacy Trust shows that increasing numbers of children don’t enjoy reading. For more on this, click here. This matters, and it impacts writing too. I love writing – most of the time. Working through ideas, following stories, the physical act of putting my pen to paper, all give me pleasure. This isn’t the case for everyone. A couple of years ago I fractured the elbow of my writing hand and when I set myself to write a page a day with my wrong hand, it was a real eye-opener. Forming letters I or anyone else could read was hard work, and by the end of a page my arm would be aching. Writing is hard, and once you start losing your confidence motivation gets hard too. There are young people so threatened by the blank page that you can set them the task of writing anything at all, even blah blah blah, and no one is going to see it, and still they freeze and their pens won’t touch the paper.
Creative writing sessions, then, need to be different. It needs to be clear that we are writing not wronging and in these sessions I got more adventurous about drawing, using our bodies, playing games and sharing as ways of writing. Creative writing sessions need to be safe spaces for exploration, free from success targets – and they can be. When they are, it’s remarkable how enthusiasm for playing with words creeps back into the room with a cheeky grin on its face and perhaps a chocolate bar of resilience in its backpack, to boost the young people who need it.
Resilience is vital, and it’s needed not just in creative writing but in all aspects of life. Something that is really important to children at the moment is what I’m calling human connection – there’s almost certainly a more technical term for this, and if you know it, do tell me! In school this is about being in the room together, learning to thrive together in all our diversity. It may sound so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, but if it’s not being mentioned, it’s the elephant in the room. We all face challenges, and learning to move beyond fight, flight or freeze when we do is an essential part of growing up and a core tool for our resilience. For many children now, being in the room together, interacting on a human level, is a challenge they need to lean into in order to flourish. And I’m sure creative writing can help!
In one of the activities children collaborated to make superbeasts, throwing dice to determine who drew which part of the beast. Some had strong ideas, and learning to let others have their turn and to get curious about what beast we would end up with was an important step.
A co-created Superbeast
In some workshops children heard a poem about packing for the future and made poems filling their own haversacks. Poetry gave them a safe space to think about what the future might be like and what they might need to negotiate it.
And finally, to the F
When you do creative writing in schools in North East England (and possibly elsewhere …) you may find that you can bring quite a lot of children and young people with you if you have poems and stories about football.
In workshops with upper primary I used a new poem that I wrote with workshops in mind. Following Michael Rosen’s insight that poems ‘can be safe ways to engage with feelings in a helpful way’ I wrote a poem called My Poem is About … Each stanza is about something different: a daisy, a hedgehog, a peach … here’s the stanza about a football.
Photo by Jason Charters on Unsplash
I put each stanza on its own piece of paper and arranged them around the room. After reading the whole poem I invited children to stand beside the stanza that interested them the most In these self-organised groups children played with their chosen stanza together and then wrote their own stanzas, either about that thing or something else of their choice.
There was always a large cluster of people who chose the football. When I asked them if they’d like to be a football, they would say yes enthusiastically. Why? I’d ask, and the reply would be because we love football. After playing with the stanza many would write their own about their team or their favourite player, and some would write something else entirely. One boy, for example, told me thought the stanza wasn’t really about a football at all; it was about bullying. He’d written a stanza about a mobile phone whose screen had got cracked when it was mishandled – neatly proving, I think, Michael Rosen right!
Children at Whitley Memorial CE Primary School, Bedlington, exploring football poetry (if you’re wondering about Whitley’s school uniform policy, it was World Book Day)
This summer I’m working, through The Tute, Cambois’s arts company, with students in y7-9 at Bedlington Academy in an after-school creative writing group, creating what promises to be some really exciting writing in the gothic mode. Gothic writing, with its contrasts of beauty and the grotesque, its stories of good v evil and its brave, confused, vulnerable heroes and heroines, is an exciting space for young people and we’re having a blast. Look out for more about this project…
Finally, a shout out to all the schools who took up the offer of a taster visit: Linton Primary School, Meadowdale Primary School, NCEA Thomas Bewick CE Primary School, Cambois Primary School and Whitley Memorial CE Primary School. I hope they got something helpful from it – I certainly did, experimenting with new material and new ideas and finding out more about children and writing. It’s time now to open up bookings for next school year. If you’re a teacher or school leader, do think about how a creative writing visit might help your school with literacy, and, perhaps even more importantly, how working with writers like me might help with the 4th R, too.