National Poetry Day: Water

The 3rd October was National Poetry Day and this year's theme was 'water'. For our workshop activities, we concentrated on the theme of 'Sea Fever'. Cate had children contributing drawings to a giant sea mural and I helped some poems to be born out of John Masefield's original.

By Joy, aged 12

 

I also asked children, parents and staff their first thought when they heard the word ‘water’ and put together the poem below from what they told me.  

 

WATER THOUGHTS

 

Water is the source of life

but also takes our thoughts

to being thirsty when we’re fasting,

diluting juice and cups of tea.

It cools and soothes, and its drip-drop sound

makes some of us want to pee.

 

Water is the source of life

but also takes our thoughts

to blue seas on our holidays

swimming, diving, feeling hot;

whales and dolphins; even sharks

with teeth going ‘clop clop clop’.

 

Water is the source of life

but also takes our thoughts

to relaxing in the bath

showers, soap and washing hands,

cold drinks, fountains, wishing wells,

waterfalls and desert lands.

 

Water is the source of life

Splish, splosh, splash! A drink, a drink!

taking our thoughts to all these things.

But most of all, ‘Rain’, we think.

 

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.

Eunice and Leopold

The lion and the unicorn have sat above the hospital's main entrance for well over a century now. Cate and I reckon that Eunice looks pretty unhappy - what with King Leopold IV roaring next to her and having to sit on a thistle all that time. She's not very comfortable.

We've been making up a story about her in which she demands to get down and the other things of the hospital have to help her. The trouble is that nothing seems quite throne-like enough for her when she does leave Leopold behind.

We've started reading our stories to some of the children we meet on the wards. Seven year old Iona on Ward 4 reckoned Leopold wasn't quite as fierce as he was making out. This is her drawing of him winking at Eunice!

How to make a story book

One day in July we had fun with a delightful girl called Joy who was very keen indeed to create stories. We stitched together a simple book and thoroughly enjoyed filling it with a story, taking turns to come up with ideas, to write, draw, colour in etc. The main character and her cat, Lily Savage, were the creation of Joy herself and Annabelle was such a great character that the ideas took off from there.

We look forward to seeing books two and three, as something very interesting is promised by the final page of book one - see below!

A name for the Sick Kids characters?

Have you been to see 'The Croods'?  Or perhaps you remember 'The Clangers' and 'The Borrowers'? We need your help in finding a similar group name for our hospital characters. Here's some of them.

 

What do they have in common?  They all belong to the Sick Kids Hospital and have jobs to do there. They're all 'things' but have different hopes and fears and strengths and weaknesses just as we do. We're putting them in some illustrated stories and need a name which helps them belong to the hospital but still makes sense after it moves to the new site at Little France in 2017.

 

 

The Thingmies?

The Sick Kids Nitwits?

The Friends?

 

Please tell us the one you like best or add your own ideas in the comments box below.



Hot Hospital

Tuesday this week was the hottest day of the year in Edinburgh, with temperatures reaching 27 degrees. While trains melted causing chaos at Waverley Station, the Hospital continued its work. On Wednesday, Cate and I made a little book, created a first page (see below) and toured the hospital asking children on wards and waiting rooms to add a page to an ongoing story in words and pictures.

 

An enthusiastic Dad wrote several pages in verse, one illustrated by Mum, one by Granny and one by the patient herself. The story had Lorna the Play Specialist making all the children well with a magic spell but getting chicken pox herself. A girl with a broken wrist waiting for an x-ray decided that the children would then help Lorna with a potion of frogs' legs, mouldy old cheese and leeches! Amazing what heat can do to the imagination...

 

And here's poor Lorna before she is made well again.

Find the whole story with illustrations here.