Bespoke formats to suit your requirements - from working with small groups, whole classes, or whole year groups during full or half day timescales. Longer projects also available with Arts Award national certification and qualifications available where appropriate (enabling nationally recognised attainment to compliment learning). Examples of en-masse engagement include:  curricular launch/'Wow' days with 240 KS2 and 80 KS1 pupils totalling 320 engaged in a day, to 5 x 1 hour rolling assemblies for KS3/4 throughout a day​ (with over a 1000 pupils engaged) delivering great value on a price per head basis. Workshops aim to contribute to your school's/Trust's quality of education, working with you to support the needs of your curricular intent and sequencing/curriculum planning.

This allows pupils to experience and participant in live poetry and collaborate in positive joint enterprise literature, endowing them with enthusiasm to access the wider curriculum and essential key transferrable social skills for life. Aside from writing, pupils are guided through performance preparation and context for delivery to help them understand how conveying poetry with appropriate intonation and gesture gives greater impact to words. 

How a typical full day workshop unfolds...

I aim to support the curricular intent, priorities and policies linked to delivering a quality education at your school or Trust. Firstly by being well planned and prepared with staff ahead of the workshop so your day goes smooth, and secondly by offering an engaging high quality literacy experience for pupils on the day.

The beginning of the workshop introduces pupils to the world of 'Performance Poetry', a demonstration of fun improvised poetry that helps pupils and staff engage and feel part of the fun from the outset. The workshop continues with a series of fun and slightly competitive team exercises that build on pupils' strengths, word usage and performance skills. Pupils are then given a step by step demonstration of theme exploration, rhyme development and writing structure tips. Creative writing follows, with pupils exploring specific theme, offering opportunities to share ideas and develop confidence and ownership as they create. 

After guidance on refining and redrafting we look at performance, developing awareness of tone, emphasis, pause, projection and body language as pupils work together on their performance. After rehearsing all the groups come together in a fun, high energy showcase set in an X-Factor style competition with selected adults teachers/governours/special guests selected as small panel of 'judges', who offer constructive praise and feedback based on the words and performances shared. The top three teams enter the shout off phase, a democratic way for the audience to choose the performance they liked most, before final words from judges and teachers and a few calm down exercises to bring the energy levels back down ready for home time.

 By the end of the workshop young people will have:

• Increased core curricular skills - reading, writing, speaking, listening and reading aloud
• Developed literacy confidence, enabling access and attainment across the curriculum
• Experienced the curriculum more broadly, acquiring knowledge and skills to help enrich their cultural capital and character
• Demonstrated literacy confidence and creative ownership
• Positively expressed pupil voice and feelings 
• Imagined and explored feelings and ideas, focusing on creative uses of language and how to interest the reader or listener
• Reviewed, commented, improved on what has been read, seen or heard, focusing on the topic
• Pupils would also have been taught to use writing to help their thinking, investigating, organising and learning. 
• Developed transferrable emotional and social skills which are key components for life and work
• Developed writing and performance skills that consider the audience
• Smiled and laughed during a full day of poetry!

 Content/Theme of workshop