On our recent trip to Nepal we were joined by our good friend, Australian children's author Libby Hathorn. This was Libby's second visit to Nepal after her wonderfully successful
100 Views Kathmandu program run at our
model school in 2008.
This time Libby ran a one day creative writing workshop for class 7 and 8 girls living in the orphanage at Bal Mandir. The program was also joined by 4 specially selected students from the model school, 3 of our
Dream Centre facilitators, and two children's authors working with
Room-to-Read.
Libby started the workshop talking about different types of creative writing and had plenty of her own work on hand to show as examples. The children were so excited to be sitting in the same room as a published author! She next delved into poetry and had everyone standing and jumping around to act out the words in some poems. Continuing with the focus on words the students were divided into groups and had to work on describing two contrasting feelings/emotions using other similar words. This really got the students thinking and once this was finished, they then had to devise and perform a short drama illustrating the feelings described. Most of the groups chose to mime their dramas and ask the class to guess the feelings being conveyed which led to some hilarious results!
After some quick lunch the final work for the day saw the children begin to write their own poems. Libby shared a number of different techniques for structuring poetry with the class and the results were fantastic! Many of the students really managed to capture some strong feelings and descriptions in their short piece of writing. The class was left with a homework assignment of writing a short story of about two pages in length which they were all eager to begin immediately.
We must once again thank Libby for sharing her wealth of knowledge and experience with us and really making a wonderful day for the students. I'm sure it gave our Dream Centre facilitators and the Room-to-Read writers lots of great new ideas too! Thanks also to Libby and Room-to-Read who both donated books for the children at Bal Mandir to enjoy.
This time Libby ran a one day creative writing workshop for class 7 and 8 girls living in the orphanage at Bal Mandir. The program was also joined by 4 specially selected students from the model school, 3 of our Dream Centre facilitators, and two children's authors working with Room-to-Read.
Libby started the workshop talking about different types of creative writing and had plenty of her own work on hand to show as examples. The children were so excited to be sitting in the same room as a published author! She next delved into poetry and had everyone standing and jumping around to act out the words in some poems. Continuing with the focus on words the students were divided into groups and had to work on describing two contrasting feelings/emotions using other similar words. This really got the students thinking and once this was finished, they then had to devise and perform a short drama illustrating the feelings described. Most of the groups chose to mime their dramas and ask the class to guess the feelings being conveyed which led to some hilarious results!
After some quick lunch the final work for the day saw the children begin to write their own poems. Libby shared a number of different techniques for structuring poetry with the class and the results were fantastic! Many of the students really managed to capture some strong feelings and descriptions in their short piece of writing. The class was left with a homework assignment of writing a short story of about two pages in length which they were all eager to begin immediately.
We must once again thank Libby for sharing her wealth of knowledge and experience with us and really making a wonderful day for the students. I'm sure it gave our Dream Centre facilitators and the Room-to-Read writers lots of great new ideas too! Thanks also to Libby and Room-to-Read who both donated books for the children at Bal Mandir to enjoy.
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