Oops! Late Mark for Jilly ...

I gave myself detention after I arrived half an hour late for last Saturday's session!  I am so sorry! First the train was cancelled, then half of Croydon was cordoned off so no buses could get through; it was a complete nightmare!  So you can imagine how touched I was when I walked into the library to see the Young Writers all seated, waiting patiently and the welcoming smiles that lit their faces!  I was originally tempted to cancel the session when I realised I was not going to get there on time.  But I am glad I didn't because, even though we had a much shorter session in the end, the Young Writers - champions that they are - still got stuck in to the latest exercise in what little time they had so huge, huge thanks to you all for your loyalty and your faith in me; you have made me feel very humbled.

So what we were doing was looking at a new way to create a story.  I presented the Young Writers with three beakers, one for TITLES, one for PEOPLE and one for PLACES.  They were invited to pick a paper from each and then use their three picks to plan a story.  What I had hoped was that they could each write their story and then swap their pieces of paper with someone else and try again. Unfortunately due to the time constraints we did not get to that stage but the assignment set was to take their paper pieces and their ideas home and create their stories there.

The point of this exercise is to challenge their imaginations and challenge is the right word because several Young Writers seemed a bit baffled by their picks.  How do you tie together an unlikely mix such as The Haunted School (title), the shop in the park (place) and Young Ali (character)?  But after giving a couple of brief examples to show that a new story can come out of anything I could literally see the penny drop with many of them, and once it had, off they went with their pens, heads clearly brimming with ideas.

In the end it turned out to be an excellent, if somewhat reduced, session and twelve children turned up so it was more of a success than a disaster!

Next session is on 24th June so see you there and, once again, thank you to everyone.