Imaginations Can Soar in Lockdown

"I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”    J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan 

 

Welcome to my second blog post since becoming the Writer in Residence at Peter Pan Moat Brae. 

 

The past two weeks have been a flurry of research, reading and some writing. As well as the usual day-to-day of home schooling and other domestic concerns I have been reading all about J.M. Barrie and have started to read various collections that feature Peter Pan.

 

I decided I would host a creative writing workshop for 7-8 year olds that are in my child's class. I asked them to collect or observe things from their gardens and from their daily walks in nature. One had whittled sticks, another had collected some fantastic large crystal-like rocks from near the University of Glasgow, another had pinecones and we had leaves from the Japanese Acer tree that looked like creepy hands. 

 

Like Barrie, my aim was to be inspired by young people, and in turn, inspire them to create their own stories or at least to come up with a seed of an idea. The theme was #GrowTallWith Stories and we started with the story SEED - a character or an object or a theme. All ideas grow from seeds as in nature. Then you water them, tend to the growing leaves, the shoots, the buds and in the end you have a fully-fledged story.

 

Here is a story written by Robin aka WALRUS (each child came up with a pen name at the beginning of the session). The bird (in the photo shown) was made by Robin and his family from collected wood from their walks. It was the inspiration that helped him to write this wonderful and vibrant story. Thank you Walrus for sharing it with us! 

 

Whitechest and the Black Rainbow

By Robin (pen name ‘Walrus’), age 7

 

 

Once there lived a bird, a Japanese White Eye named Whitechest.  His home was the most admired Cherry Blossom in Kyoto.  Though his home was beautiful and full of colour he was very lonely. Whitechest had no family, he was an orphan. A digger destroyed his family nest to build a hotel and only Whitechest, who was still an egg, survived.  One day, he overheard some tourists talking about others just like him in Hawaii. After that it became Whitechest’s dream to fly there and find a new family.

 

Everyday he practiced flying farther and farther out over the ocean. One day, he was resting in his nest and he heard a rumble. He looked up to see a GIANT black rainbow! This he knew would be a big storm and would stop him getting to Hawaii. He tried to fly up and run over it but it was too slippery because the rain was coming down so hard. After hours of slipping and falling he flew exhausted back to his nest in the Cherry Blossom tree. He woke up soon after because a stone was jabbing into his bum! He looked at it closely and it was a multi-coloured rock. He had an idea!

 

Whitechest picked it up with his beak and threw it at the big black rainbow! There was lightning all over the sky and the clouds became pink and orange. It stopped raining and Whitechest watched with his beak open as all the colours of the rainbow slowly emerge from the black rainbows mouth.  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet filled the sky and ended at Whitechest’s nest. He hopped on to the rainbow and knew they would be friends forever.

 

 

Rainbow smiled and carried little Whitechest all the way to Hawaii. When he arrived, his own colours were brighter than ever before - his white chest glowed like snow in the sun, his green back shimmered like polished emeralds and his yellow throat shone like the brightest sun. His bright colours attracted all the other Japanese White Eyes in Hawaii and he found his new family at last. 

 

#GrowTallWithStories #PeterPanMoatBraeTrust #Imagination