Kate Williams

Greetings for 2018!

January may be cold and murky, but poetry is as fun and exciting as you make it – any time of the year. With this term’s Flying Carpet theme, we’ll be sweeping up and away to brighter, more colourful places in my workshops – unless anyone’s capsizes and lands on the school roof.

We’ll be shooting away even further in our Space workshops, with planets for Juniors to invent and stars for Infants to enact and describe, and possibly the odd alien to invite down to Earth. So the murky months of January and February will be anything but, with the children’s thrilling imagery, crazy couplets and mind-stretching personification lighting up the classroom.

As for Dragons – the ever-popular theme I offer every spring term – well, they could carry us off anywhere in the world, or beyond it, if they’re the wild sort, but fortunately, dragons are as varied in their characters as humans are, as children reveal in their fascinating interpretations – although they all have pretty weird diets, it seems.

Spring is a wide-open theme, with plenty of squelchy mud and sinking wellies as well as crisp new leaves and fresh, green grass. On our imaginary wanders through spring fields and woods, we encounter new life in all sorts of forms – wiggly caterpillars, hatching eggs, playful fox cubs, and excitable puppies being taken for a walk, perhaps.

I adapt each topic to suit the different age groups from Nursery to Year 6 and above, offering one topic per day, to save carting too many piles of pictures, artefacts and papers around. It’s also quite hard to tune in and out of the different themes, and my different plans for them all, in one day – hence just the one topic per day, please. It’s the poetry that really matters, and there’s wonderful, boundless scope for that in all four themes.

You’ll find details of the workshops, including price per day for your area, on my e.flyers, which I send out at the start of term, but please get in touch if you’ve not received one, or want to know more.

Kate
katewilliams.poetry@gmail.com

January 2018