I have been following Sally Pewhairangi’s 100 Days of Creativity project with great interest and yesterday was posting 100 of 100!

So Sally …….

 

What an amazing effort and commitment! I thoroughly enjoyed reading your little vignettes.

I totally love Sally’s concept for using Afterliff: The New Dictionary of Things There Should Be Words for by John Lloyd and Jon Canter to inspire creative writing.  As a result of Sally sharing her idea I have purchased a copy of this dictionary for the school library and have shared the concept with our HOF English in the hope this might be a technique the English Department employs in engaging and encouraging boys to think creatively about words and language.

 

I think there are a number of ways this book could be used:

• Word of the Week 1 – choose a different word each week, display it in the library and invite students to come up with a meaning for it.
• Word of the Week 2 – alternatively, choose a word, display it with its meaning and invite students to write the funniest, cleverest, or most imaginative sentence.
• Library Week – either of these could work as a “word for the day” competition during library week celebrations.
• Class activity – Matching game: Select 50-60 words and type them on playing card-size cards.  Then type the corresponding meanings on another set of cards and put them into sets of 10.  When you have a class booked into the library, you could suggest teachers might like to group their class into teams of 3 or 4, give them a set of cards and challenge them to match the word with the meaning.  If it’s an English class or a junior school class their teacher could then have them write a 100 word short story using one of the words, just like Sally did – 100 times!

I reckon there’s probably other ideas as well.  If you think of one, why not add to this list in the comments below?