Year 4 recently enjoyed a creative afternoon with a group from Bournemouth University called The Story Works. The students were here to promote the creative process of story writing and the children certainly didn’t hold back with their ideas! The children were asked to come up with ideas for characters, a setting, a plot and a goal. They then voted for their favourites. Ideas ranged from orange balancing capybaras hunting for golden pickles to a dancing pizza in trouble with the burger police. (Do you think they might have been hungry?)
Once the main ingredients had been chosen the children were then invited to complete the story or come up with their own version. They loved the freedom of being able to unleash their imaginations and create surreal stories, with out boundaries. Most excitingly, The Story Works will take their group story and illustrate it with bespoke drawings, before returning the template to school, so each child can have their own copy.
It was very gratifying for us teachers to see the children employing many of the techniques taught in our writing lessons, such as fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases and short sentences to add suspense.
A big thanks to The Story Works for an afternoon of ideas and imagination!
