FYI, this post is a THROWBACK post! I have lots more pieces of written work that are also waiting to be published! 😛
Hello pawsome peeps! How are you? I hope you’re settling into the new school year OK. A lot of things have been happening since school has started. I am now a Digital Leader, I have gotten into Choir, the new members of JLT have been selected and a lot more! But, there was one particularly exciting event that took place yesterday. Read the following to find out…
It was…a Pobble Workshop!!! I had been waiting for this for ages! Finally, the day had come! Just to let you know, Pobble is a website where teachers and parents are able to post a picture of their children’s writing for the world to read! It is used by 10,000 teachers in over 100 countries and has 30,000+ pieces of work posted on it!
There were only four people out of the whole school that attended the workshop: me, Nimat, Leah and Shoaib. 7 other schools had also come to our school to attend the workshop. They were all Year 6, we were the only people from Year 5!
Of course, there was no better person to host it than the man himself, founder of Pobble, Simon Blower a.k.a. Mr Pobble! I found him very kind and welcoming; we all enjoyed working with him.
To start off, we were shown a picture of an old, scruffy-looking man walking along a road that was shrouded in a thick mist. The only other things that were there to accompany him were several clocks showing different times (mysterious! 😯) and an upside-down lamppost! Using this picture, we had to write three sentences about it: ‘I see…’, ‘I think…’ and ‘I wonder if…’. My sentences were:
- I see an old man walking down a foggy road.
- I think he may be near water.
- I wonder if he can control time?
Most of us wrote the same thing for the third sentence due to the fact that all the clocks in the picture were showing different times. This was related to the theme of our writing, which was…time travelling! We had to write a story in which we travelled through time to a different era. Now, this wasn’t like another old English lesson where we are set off to work after briefly talking about it as a class. In the workshop, we went through each stage of the story-one at a time-whilst we were writing to make sure that it was perfect!
Before we started on our stories, we had to choose an object that would send us on our time travelling adventures! My object was a golden pocket watch with azure hands. Other people chose things like keys, flowers, pendants and even cupboards! Interesting! 😀
After that, we moved on to the first stage of our story, which was called the hook. This was the opening paragraph, which had to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to read on. To cut it short, we had to basically ‘hook’ the reader onto our story.
The second stage of our story was to introduce the magical object that makes us travel through time. In this stage, we had to think of how the object came into our lives. Some people said that their parents owned it and passed it down to them whereas others said that they found it lying on the floor in the street.
The next stage that we had to do was write about our journey through time. The main things that we had to think about were what you could see whilst travelling through time and what it felt like when you time travelled. What colours could you see? Were you flying? Were you spinning? People came up with all sorts of crazy ideas such as ‘being thrown into a tunnel of colour’ and ‘shaking around like a rag doll’. One of my favourites was ‘energy surged through my body like a tidal wave’! 👍
Finally, we had to write up our dilemma! In this stage, we had to reveal the era that we had ended up in and create a problem that we had to face e.g. being captured or not being able to go back home. Then we had to finish off with something called a ‘cliffhanger ending’, which is when the dilemma of a story comes at the end. I pretended that I had travelled to the time period when Queen Victoria ruled and two guards were trying to catch me. Other children chose Ancient Egypt and the Roman time period. One person even decided to travel to the future when robots ruled Earth! Sounds fascinating!
When we finished all that, our story was complete and ready for posting! We gave our sheets to Mr. Pobble and waved him goodbye. Writing with the founder of Pobble was such a great experience. I didn’t want it to end! Hopefully I will have the chance to have another Pobble day another time! 🙂
Oh well, that’s all for this post. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading it! Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for the next post. Goodbye!!!
p/s: If you would like to visit Pobble, click on the link below:
The Pawsome Lion 