Developing the original voice

Key points for this workshop: (a) it's concentrated; (b) it makes the familiar strange

Group work wish board/flip chart

1. Observation (to fit with project theme if there is one) on object or place/ real or imagined - talk class (in silence) through, sense by sense
2. Take suggestions about subject, choose one for class work.
3. Ask class for specific questions for each sense (e.g. colour/sight, texture/touch). Choose one for each. Use list format.
4. Ask class to forget the original subject and to suggest other things which are that colour, then that texture, etc. Encourage them to experiment!
5. Talk about riddles. Ask class for definitions and examples. Read one. Point out one of the earliest forms of poetry in English (Anglo-Saxon - give example if time, or at start if you have worked with the class before.)
6. Discuss riddle formats. Use of first person. Apply riddle format to material on board/flipchart.
7. Discuss simile/metaphor dilemma with class: I'm as yellow as tinned apricots/I'm the yellow of tinned apricots. Why one rather than other? Metaphors "speeded-up" similes/cover your tracks well.

Read a poem of your own and talk about it with the class.

Class write individual riddles by the same method, while going round the class helping and suggesting (and teacher support with kids with literacy problems in particular):

1. Ask class to go back to and remember their own original subjects.
2. Ask the same kind of questions (sense by sense) and ask them to write down answers in list format Pupils who work fast can write down several answers to each question.
3. Keeping the class together, ask them to modify these answers as in group work.
4. Ask class to add riddle formats to their ideas.

Get volunteers to read out their riddles and have the class guess the answers.

What is this workshop for?

• refreshes distinction simile/metaphor;

• gets class using similes and metaphors which are their own rather than "appropriate" and finding they're effective, i.e. they keep classmates guessing;

• helps pupils avoid purely visual observation;

• teaches form/ tensions between invention and form;

• should allow the ones who like fun to be funny and the ones who want to be descriptive to do that too;

• most important, leaves a set of strategies, a kind of transferable how-to-do-it, with pupils and teachers, especially as a big problem for Years 7 & 8 is loss of confidence in their own ideas.

© Fiona Sampson 

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