Prior to lockdown I was running a book club at my children's school and it was one of the most joy-filled parts of every week. We had a different theme each time and loads of activities going on – shadowing book awards, creative writing competitions, author visits, and lots more – but the best part was just chatting about books with the young people who were so keen to come along. It was magical to be able to provide a space for them to just be themselves around books, without any pressure or expectations. We read books, we talked about books and it was wonderful.
After a break over the lockdown period, we're now back up and running again – hooray! – albeit under different conditions for now because of the current restrictions. We've taken the fun online through live after-school video calls and a blog on the school's system that all the children can access.
We had our second call at the start of this week and we had a poetry theme and I just wasn't prepared for all the loveliness that the children brought along! We shared our favourite poems, we talked about why we liked them and we discussed the similarities and differences between poems and stories. I smiled and laughed and pondered and mused for the whole half hour and beyond.
We read a few poems from the pictured book, which features lots of poems that are also riddles. We were so impressed by how cleverly the poets had woven their words, even when the poems looked quite short and simple, and we decided we might have a go at writing some ourselves over half term.
We also set ourselves a 'spine poetry' challenge, where we'll aim to make up our own poems using the words along the spines of any books we can find that look interesting! If possible, I'll try and share some on here once they're done...
Anyway, amidst all the gloom and uncertainty that's around at the moment, our book club session was a warm, happy half-hour and I felt so privileged to be able to share with such a great bunch of bookworms. Roll on the next session!
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