Gifted and Talented in the North West

Had a fantastic afternoon at Altrincham Girls' Grammar School, where they were hosting a Gifted and Talented day for children in the North West. I ran a poetry workshop.

We started by establishing my ground rules for poetry workshops:

1. No rhyming

2. You have to keep writing. If you can’t think what to write then just write, ‘I don’t know what to write.’

After a few warm up activities where the children had a great deal of freedom over the form they chose, we switched to more controlled form using first diamond poems and then I introduced them to cinquains. That section finished with the pupils writing cycles of cinquains based on the perspectives of characters from a story they liked (e.g. The Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, Grandma, The Woodcutter).

The final stage of the afternoon was spent using the old Dadaist cutup technique. The pupils wrote a piece of descriptive writing, cut up the words individually and then reformed them into poems. A low tech version of fridge magnets.

As usual, the children were the star of the show. However, they were run a close second by the staffroom at AGS. This looked like a suite from an expensive hotel and even had its own baby grand piano.