New ways of seeing old tales

Frank Cottrell Boyce stays that stories are there to help you understand and empathise with people you wouldn’t have understood or empathised with before, because we get to hear their perspective.

This term instead of bringing the stories off the page with drama, we will be encouraging your students to get into the page themselves, imagine how it would be to live like some of the characters in your set texts and them write their own story from that point of view. Throughout your sessions, our creative writers will introduce your students to new ways of approaching characterisation and plot setting. They will be encouraged to take risks with their writing and produce a short story. Often it can seem that great stories come easily and sometimes they do, but it is important for students to know that often there is a long editing process that goes into a great story or piece of writing and that they too should be reviewing and editing their work. By the end of the Verse vs. Verse creative writing sessions your students will hopefully have a truly unique piece of writing that they can be proud of!

highlights of PERSPECTIVES project plan

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‘Everyone can be a writer…’

With the rise of the visual image and sound-bite text thanks to the media and internet, it has become much harder to engage children in creative writing. The challenge for teachers is how to harness this media and use it as an inspirational starting point. Children very much enjoy immersing themselves in imaginary worlds, however, a study done by the National Literacy Trust (2011) showed that 42% of students “have trouble deciding what to write”. Unsurprisingly therefore, 72% of students claimed “writing is more fun when you can chose the topic”.  It is therefore the Eastside practitioner’s goal to try and harness this imagination and willingness to write about topics that are relevant to the students and develop some strong and enthusiastic creative writers.

Verse vs. Verse aims to engage students with creative writing through bringing playfulness, imagination and a more diverse, free approach to writing. 450 students will work with our professional creative writers, who will set them fun yet challenging tasks aimed at helping the children find what type of creative writing they are really interested in and build their confidence. Creative writing can come from anything, a dream, song or a jingle, our creative writers will encourage your students to follow their imaginations and develop their writing.

‘at the age of 8 there is an amazing lack of fear’ Bobby Nayyar reflects on Verse vs. Verse

Bobby Nayyar worked with Norbury, Trent and St Paul’s. He reflects on his experiences here-

http://www.eastside.org.uk/news/featured_artist_the_month__april