Sara Cassidy, a published writer of children’s books, delivered her second set of poetry workshops to Denman’s school kids last month as an auxiliary Readers and Writers Festival event. Both she and the school staff are eager for a third set of workshops next year as they have been so inspirational. Here are her words that confirm how great our kids— and their teachers are. Enjoy!
I had a wonderful two days with the Denman community school students — what a heap of lovely, bright people.
We talked on the first day about character and how personality and what a person has experienced (and their setting, where they live!) shapes how a person acts in the world, and how they will be affected and changed by the world: in writing terms, a character’s unique conflicts and backstory (and setting!) sets in motion a story/plot unique to them.
The second day, we talked about dialogue — how to make it lively and engaging, how it is not like a came of catch but more like a dance with no set choreography — it must spin beyond the reader’s (and even the writer’s) expectation; yet, though it has no choreography, it is given shape by something internal: the personalities of the people talking, their wants and needs (referring to the day 1 workshops). In other words, a cantankerous person who loves hockey will speak very differently about the new arena being built than a shy embroiderer who doesn’t care one whit about hockey.
The workshops were tweaked for each age group, but I wanted the themes and some exercises to be identical, to unite the students across the school. For example, for every class, I started day 1 by drawing a dinner fork on the whiteboard, then asked the students to describe it. “Stabby!” said a kindergartner. “Four long tines and a long handle, made of metal or plastic,” said a grade 6-er. And then I said, sure, but how about we give this fork a personality? And thus we entered the world of character. What does this fork want? “To eat!” “Revenge!” “To be a spoon!” Etc. Then the fork met another character. In one case, this was a mouse trying desperately to get to the moon. The kids easily came up with a conversation and plot involving the two, and thus a group story was born. One thing learned: Everyone is different, and everyone speaks differently (e.g., phrasing, vocabulary, many words or few), about different things. Pay attention to how characters speak in the books you read — if the dialogue is well written, you will be able to learn a lot about the characters. Another exercise that all students did was write a poem from the perspective (what I want, how I’ll get it, where I am, etc.) of a simple object, named on a slip of paper, each student getting a different one (knife, anchor, etc.) One child wrote of an anchor that desperately wanted to swim.
Some highlights: The youngest class did not want me to stop reading from one of my books, so we dove in, a marathon read of the entire book, with breaks to stretch and to discuss things that came up related to character and dialogue. On a different day, I set up the same young kids in groups of three or four, each with a copy of one of my wordless picture books, which they followed together with their fingers as I read from a spoken version of the book prepared for CNIB, explaining to the kids all about that. Another highlight was talking about dialogue with the older class and reading bits of dialogue to them — they really enjoyed being read to, and I’d do more of this next time. It generates discussion, of course. Highlight: The middle class had very recently read a book of mine together, which made for LOTS to talk about — common ground, which was really wonderful. They were extremely insightful. Unfortunately, the middle class was also less of a highlight on day 2 because the teacher asked me to create an exercise for with very specific parameters — theatre exercise, with “good” and “evil” characters. I tried…but it wasn’t the best 🙂 Next time, I would ask if the teachers want specific curriculum woven into the workshops, so would have more time to come up with something.