Poetry Workshops for October & November

My poetry workshops for October and November are full of sparks, spooks, thumps, zooms and dazzles!

My theme choices are Autumn Leaves (and don't groan: leaves are fascinating, fun and full of potential for imagination-flying - see below!), Wild Woods, Giants, Fireworks and Christmas Colours. I love them all; so do the children!

Take those leaves for starters: they're not just old, brown, dilapidated, slippery nuisances, blocking up our gutters and sending us tumbling - although there's plenty for a poem in all that too! They're colour wonders, fragility miracles, sky-decorators, dancers, acrobats, adventurers! In our workshops we may take one and sail with it, over forests and cities, over seas, deserts, jungles. A girl in one of my sessions sent hers to New York and got it driving a taxi (in her poem at least). As for those colours, growing richer by the week, kids bask in their imagery potential! The other day, a five-year-old added, as a little afterthought to a poem about a falling leaf, that it was 'as orange as a tiger in the jungle'.

As for giants - they get everywhere (particularly through school roofs and staffroom walls, I should warn you), with their colossal, crashing feet - heads literally in the clouds. Not that our giant poetry is all about destructive giants, or male ones either. Angelic, sunset-gliding female giants mingled with lonely, gentle giant lads in our poetry sessions at Clarendon Junior School, Wiltshire last week, along with some clumsy, butter-fingered characters that reminded me of myself, and one or two grizzly beasts from pre-historic times too, I should add, whose voices shook the school hall windows.

Wild Woods is another theme that speaks for itself, especially with Halloween round the corner - or behind that tree trunk. My bag of soft toy animals comes into its own here, spurring ideas and language for movements, sounds and atmosphere.

Fireworks is another favourite of mine - and the kids! It has everything: noise, colour,action, drama, mystery, patterns and shapes, hot fire, hot dogs, hot chocolate, and a shiver down your back from a faint owl hoot, perhaps.

My Christmas Colours theme involves everything from fairy lights to traffic lights, and is suitable for children of any or no religion. What does a town look like after dark, for instance?

Further details of my workshops are available on my other website:

http://poemsforfun.wordpress.com/workshops/
Kate
Kate Williams
Children's Poet & Workshop Leader
Email: katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com
Represented by The Poetry Society, Authors Abroad, Authors Aloud UK and Literature Wales.