When I ride my bike…

We had fun on Saturday leading a ‘Words on Wheels’ trail in Hove Park as part of the Council’s Bike Week activities. Children had to ride round and find word clues and use them to write poems about cycling.  Here are some of my favourite lines taken from all the poems that were written by [...]

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Cinematic Experiences

The Ghost cinema, originally uploaded by phill.d.
Lots of memories are evoked when we go to the cinema, as both Piglets and Saddlebacks found out in their writing sessions this week. Local readers’ and writers’ forum, QueenSpark Books, are compiling interesting texts written by people from Brighton and Hove about the history of cinema in Brighton. [...]

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Girl on the chair

Frankie chose this atmospheric postcard in last week’s workshop. It is called ‘Resting’ by Vilhelm Hammershoi. Here’s what Frankie wrote, inspired by the image:

I’m sitting in this chair
a very lonely chair
I don’t know what to write
I really, actually don’t.
I’m listening for a pin 
a very quiet pin
but I’m really, really bored.
I don’t know what to write.

Well [...]

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A Giraffe’s New Year’s Resolutions

 
Skylight Giraffe, originally uploaded by MerlinJnr.
The Piglets also had fun last week coming up with some New Year’s resolutions – not for ourselves, of course, but for our pets and other animals.
Here’s Lillie’s resolutions for a giraffe:
I promise to grow as tall as the trees
I promise to eat loads more green leaves
I won’t ever stumble [...]

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Streets for the People – Piglets’ Storywalk

Like the Saddlebacks, the Piglets really got their teeth into creating some very strange stories on our storywalk. We had a great time wandering around and getting inspiration from the ordinary things and turning them into places where very strange things happen. One of our new Piglets, Scout, came up with some great ideas. The [...]

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Listening

   
Photo courtesy of  debastoba.
Last week in the Piglets workshop we wrote some pieces inspired by music from the film Talk to Her (one of my favourite fims!) This is the first time we’ve tried writing from music at Little Green Pig, but it’s a really simple and effective exercise that can lead off in all [...]

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Battling with Ballads

Ever tried to write a ballad? It isn’t easy, but the Saddlebacks composed an impressive variety of poems, attempting to stick to the patterend rhythm and rhyme. We started off by listening to some famous love song ballads (or famous for some of us!) and then thought about the various techniques that the form of [...]

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What’s your story?

  
Piglets and Waterstones competition, originally uploaded by littlegreenpig.
  
Both the Piglets and Saddlebacks wrote entries for the Waterstones What’s your Story writing competition yesterday. It’s amazing how the chance to win £500 of book tokens got the creative juices flowing! With the Piglets group we played a word association game to come up with the opening [...]

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Ask the Audience

Saddlebacks waiting to perform, originally uploaded by littlegreenpig.
You may remember that we left some postcards on the chairs in the audience at our Little Green Pig Performance Evening. Here are a couple of the fantastic responses.
Write a limerick about a man who likes fish:
There was an old curious day-tripper
Who found an old fish in his [...]

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Counting sy -lla -bles

Leo and Lillie

Sorry for the late post this week. I am up to my ears in ear poems, preparing for a poem trail at Portslade Infants School this Wednesday. If any of you live that end of town, come and take a look. There will be strings of special Sound Detective poems on display along [...]

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