Autumn's Coming

Yesterday Cate and I had a busy morning in the Day Case Unit, creating some displays for the windows of the play room with children, parents and staff. It's a busy place and everyone has to wait for a while before they go to theatre.

So Cate invited children to add hand-printed leaves to the tree above, making a wonderfully colourful picture of days to come. And I collected word-images to do with Autumn which became branches on the trees below.

We had fun!

spiders scuttling
a fox spying
collecting acorns
raking leaves
wearing woolly hats
glowing red cheeks
dark nights

Journeys in the Hospital

Anyone who's been to the hospital will have met its geographical challenges. The winding corridors, choices of stairs and lifts and the spread of its buildings down Rillbank Terrace and Sylvan Place, almost onto the Meadows! It's my theory that it's partly the dance we do around its quirky ways that makes it such a friendly place.

At one of our recent workshops, we used our journeys as a focus.  Cate and I made a sort of map combining pictures and words of our journey from our mugs of tea at the Friends Foundation office in Millerfield Place to the first floor library.

A 13 year old patient who arrived from ward 1 by wheelchair chose to write a poem about his journey instead.

We'd love to hear about your journeys around the hospital. Draw a map or write something, whichever you prefer and attach a document or a scan to an email to linda.cracknell@btinternet.com, telling us if you'd be happy for us to post it here.

A couple of tips - for the poem, the patient thought hard about the verbs he used for movement - scoot, swirl, scamper. And he thought about animals and how they move. For our map, Cate and I thought about senses - sights, sounds and smells.