Creative kids! Workshop wonders! What next?

Children are proving as imaginative and creative as ever in my workshops this term.

Dragons, Wild Woods and Space have been my themes so far, with Spring to join in later (in the classroom even if not beyond!), and our discussions have opened a myriad doors!

Every group adopts a slightly different focus from the last, however similar my input and directing each time. One child's idea will influence the next which will knock on to the next which will colour the next..., resulting in delicious assortments! The fiery, smouldering dragons in one room will be a world away from the lazy, time-wasting beasts in the next; floral forests down the corridor will flourish in blissful ignorance of the eerie, forbidden ones across the hall.

Today, at Creigiau Primary School near Cardiff, where Space was our theme, delights included monkey-cheeky aliens, diamond-studded planets, crackling comets, hurtling rockets, and shooting stars walzing elegantly through black holes. Yesterday's space poems, at Coychurch Primary, produced a different, yet no less thrilling, array of space life.

Next term - the so-called 'Summer Term' (funny joke for us in flood-hit UK) - my topics will be Jungle, Sea and Mini-Beasts (or creepy-crawlies, including the winged variety), so who knows what's in store come the end of April?  In our sea sessions I shall hope to find ancient, long-ago abandoned treasure, rusting away on the murky ocean floor, or at least at the bottom of a poem, and will brace myself to the possibility of sea monsters, in whatever shape and mood my young writers may devise. But in between, I'll do my best to squeeze in a snatch of sunbathing and splashing about in the lacy, sky-blue waves - well, in my head anyway, and I can be sure, before I even know which schools I shall be working with, that other poetic treats will be coming my way, once again. As for my Jungle workshops, there's no guessing what thrills we shall encounter together as we beat a path through the poisonous, humming, sizzling tangles of... the classroom!

Meanwhile, my Spring theme awaits the busiest month of the year for a workshopper like me - March. March is the month of World Book Day, when just about every school sees fit to have a writer in to stir up that extraordinary, if sometimes bashful, young creative potential that is forever buzzing and humming away in the minds of our next generation, from one school to the next, and one country to the next, round the world.

Today I caught sight of some tightly curled, safely weatherproofed leaf buds, swinging about on a storm-swept branch. Hope, they seemed to sing!

Kate 

Kate Williams
Website: poemsforfun.wordpress.com
Twitter: @Katypoet