Emily Hodgson

Emily whipped up three wonderful pieces of writing in one Writing Time session a couple of weeks ago. We were wringing up our personal distant memories as food for our writing, though if you read comments from the last post, you can see that some Writing Timers were digging in their Imagination gardens, rather than their Memory gardens. Read the following three peices, and let us know in which garden you think Emily might be digging!

 And don't forget our new "Spot the spelling mistake" game. The first winner to spot my spelling mistake in this post gets to be the Freeze Freak next session AND first collaborator!!! Hint: You might think "wringing" is a spelling error, but it's not! It's poetic, it's alliterative, and it's allowed!

     

                          BOO!

What's that shadow in the dark? How it is moaning from the figure of a shark? It moves quietly through the pitch black dark. A gust of wind taps me on the back, and I jump!

"Where am I?" I wonder aloud. The rain starts to pour on me directly as it is a storm cloud. I shiver in fright, and take a deep breath. I see a person, but as a cloud. At that moment, I take a step and feel the edge, and I fall just at the ring of a the bell. I couldn't tell who it was, but I heard a person shout "BOO!!!" and I died!

        There are two more fantastic pieces from Emily, to be posted very soon. She is absolutely brilliant at creating a spooky atmosphere. It wouldn't surprise me if Emily ended up an author of spooky fiction.

Thank-you, Emily, I'm really looking forward to reading more of your spine-chilling stories.

White Blanket of Silence

Today there were only five Writing Timers: Sian (who turned 11 today- congratulations!), Greta, Freya, Ingrid and Edie. It was sooooo quiet for most of the session, with heads down low to the table-tops as hands flew across the pages....inventing, describing, reporting, matching, listing, rhyming...

    Freya invented a new game, where she would list nine unrelated words at the top of her page, then write a piece based on linking all the words up into a meaningful paragraph. Edie, Ingrid and I were really into this new game, it forces the imagination to open up even wider than usual to accommodate all the words. Sian was busy collating facts on particular mammals which are usually overlooked by Australian scholars, eg. the Asiatic lion, or the wolverine. She would summarise these amazing facts from one of the Drawing Time reference books on mammals and read them to me. I learnt so much today from Sian, and all the girls. Ingrid was inspired to check out all the strange names for shark types and copy them onto the whiteboard. Did you know there was a crocodile shark?

    And Greta was very busy creating such beautiful poetry. Here is her first piece that tumbled out into her little notebook in a matter of minutes: 

    

           "Rising Wind" by Greta Jakob

A song whistling in the wind comes out of its hiding place

Oh whistling wind Oh whistling wind

Will you sing me a song?           

Greta and I collaborated on two poems also, using the "Pass it on (after one or two lines)" method.

One poem was about rain, the other about snow. This is where the white blanket of silence phrase was developed, summing up not just how snowfall appears in the night, but also how Writing Time can seem, when every girl is so engrossed in writing whatever she wants to write that the sound of a pin dropping on the carpet could be heard.

Freya Van Dyke-Goodman - I remember...

       When I was 3 months old, my family and I were in the bush on a beach in the middle of nowhere. While we were there, I don't know exactly what happened, but suddenly I couldn't breathe! My mum called a hospital, but the only hospital near us was only for adults.  But there was no choice, the people at the hospital put a huge breathing sort of thing on my mouth, and then drove me to a different hospital.

       When I got there, they gave me a pill and I fell asleep. The next thing I knew was that when I woke up, I had a new teddy next to me and a tray of food, and my mum was sitting next to me. Then my mum told me that we have to stay in hospital for two more days.

Miki Redle - UFO Theories

1. There were other life forms, except they eventually became extinct because of climate change. So we eventually will become extinct too, unless we do something!
2. There are no such things as aliens. They are made up science fiction.
3. There are other life forms. They are much more advanced than humans and are making it that humans do not have proof of their existence.
4. There are no more aliens, except for just a few of their kind left.They are trying to escape from humans because humans will lock them up in cages and study them.
5. There are no aliens in this galaxy, but there are if you go through black holes / pink holes.

6. There are aliens, but they are so advanced that humans cant find / detect them.

Edie Benjamin - I remember...

I asked the girls to write about significant events that have stuck fast in their memories. Here are three from Edie Benjamin:

1. I remember....from when I was 3, my brother punched me in the nose while I was asleep, and when I woke up, my pillow was covered in blood! Then my mom dragged him by the ear to his room, but his room was only across the hall so it didn't hurt him too much!!!

2. When I was 3, I was walking the dog, and I did a face plant on the concrete, so my brother took me home. Now I have a scar on my nose.

3. Once I was in the cinema, and just two minutes into the movie, I had to go to the bathroom for a minute. When I got out of the bathroom, the movie was finished!

" Well, that was a waste of time," I sighed, "I must have gone through a WORM HOLE!!!"