What sound words do children choose?

Street Sounds -
which ones ring bells for youngsters,
and what noises do they compare them with?

I recently spent a day in a primary school, running poetry workshops with 7-9 year-olds on the theme of Street Sounds: a noisy, busy, bubbly day, and interesting too. Not just for the children - though I did my best to ensure that it would be - but for me too.

Noise for boys? Although I had predicted beforehand that some boys would choose quiet sounds for their poems, and some girls noisy ones, it was interesting, and pleasing, to observe such clear demonstrations of non-stereotypical choices as I witnessed today. Time and again their sound choices confirmed the lie that boys prefer the one, girls the other. Even more interestingly, perhaps, a few boys gradually switched over from so-called 'boys' topics', such as quad bikes, racing cars and bin lorries, to quieter ones, such as autumn leaves, rain, and mice, but only after they had deafened the rest of us with their impersonations of those roaring beasts and, it seemed, shown us all that they were indeed 'tough-guys' or 'proper boys'. What, I wondered, had planted in them that need to establish their boyishness in that way? The girls mostly seemed more relaxed about mixing violent and gentle, not needing to make a song-and-dance about either, though some seemed to opt consistently for the gentler concepts. Did they, too, feel the pull of some social constraint?

A dark influence: more interesting still - though in a distressing way in this case - was the frequency with which they boys used war imagery to describe loud sounds. Lorries and such like were as noisy as 'a bomb', 'a nuclear bomb',  'World War III', or 'a gun'. But what else can we expect, when war is what they see and hear about on the television every day?

The rich offerings of English: nevertheless, plenty of fun was had by all today, I think; they certainly seemed enthusiastic - some not even wanting to stop writing at the end of the activity! It was partly the acting-out - the stamping of feet, tooting of traffic, growling of dogs, and so forth, that made the 75 minute sessions so enjoyable, and partly the display of toy cars and other street-relevant toys I'd brought along; and no doubt, too, the performance at the end, involving the chance to climb up onto the school stage. But it was also - above all perhaps - the wonders offered up by the English language that made sounds such fun and fascinating to write about.  A language that offers such a plethora of words for the sound of feet walking on a pavement, or of rain falling on an umbrella, for instance, is inevitably going to be fun to play about with. I suppose if Britain had not been invaded from all sides over the centuries, back in the Dark Ages, it would never have been so marvellously enriched: an irony we often forget.

But I must stop clicking and clacking and tapping and pattering and clunking and thumping and clattering on this computer keyboard, and get these ponderings posted!