The second week of our Food, Glorious Food! project with Salway Ash Primary School was a busy mix of sharing experiences and writing. The youngsters brought in recipes and talked about why they were an important part of their lives.

Our primary school storymaking workshops are one of BODAN’s flagship fun creative writing sessions, in which a class of children in Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11) become published authors in a single morning, with a fully illustrated book given to each participant.

Our exciting new project at Salway Ash Primary School is underway. Food Glorious Food! is a celebration of what we love to eat, and an exploration of the stories behind those favourite foods and experiences.

In France, September is known as La Rentrée. A new academic year begins, the family holiday season is over, and everyone is getting organised.

The final report from our short blog series on the inaugural summer holiday creative writing club…

The penultimate in our short blog series reporting from our summer holiday creative writing club…

Day 3: There was an aura of serenity about the place as our young writers entered to music from a Japanese garden and an oasis of calm, for our Japanese Literary Garden Day.

The second in our short series of summer holiday club posts…

Day 2: We had a food-themed day and it was another jam-packed session for the young writers (pun fully intended!).

What an August at BODAN! In between preparing for big autumn projects and book launches, we ran our first Summer Holiday Creative Writing Club at the WI Hall in Bridport.

Regulars to this blog will know that our Primary Storymaking workshops have been a massive success story since they began in November 2021. We visit a Key Stage 2 class or year group, we help them to write a story collaboratively up to a cliffhanger moment, and we set them off to write their own endings in a writing journal.

Marshwood Primary school’s Lamberts class had last dibs on TBODAN storymaking workshops for this academic year, and they had a tough act to follow after Pilsdon Class’s buzzing effort.

Amberley has tirelessly supported our first academic year of school workshops and been integral to the unique small group writing mentoring we bring to all sessions. Frankly, some kind of recognition was long overdue, so it was good to revisit Amberley’s path to our volunteer network.

Our last two primary storymaking workshops of this academic year were spent at Marshwood School. Our morning with Pilsdon Pen class was just one aspect of a fortnight of creative and active enrichment for the 10-11 year-olds, all laid on by this delightful school.

We were asked to get involved with Woodroffe School’s Big Write, an annual event for the whole of Year 8 - 150+ pupils. We went straight for the serious stuff and asked Clive Stafford-Smith, founder and director of human rights law charity 3DC, to kick off the day with a talk to the entire cohort.

Appropriately titled Fire vs Water, Bridport Primary School’s other Year 5 storymaking session involved developing the elements as character, with Ember the firefox and Ocean the water fox having fallen out many years prior.

We worked with Bridport Primary School’s Year 5 classes to create more weird and wonderful stories. We were fortunate to run both sessions at Bridport’s Lyric Theatre, a wonderful venue with creativity in its very fabric.

Our workshop with Kingfisher class saw pupils name the main character after TBODAN’s very own Nick. Zombie Nick had a tricky task in facing the Eyeball, who taunted Nick with lemonade - every zombie’s biggest fear, it appears.

What a month! The Bank of Dreams & Nightmares’ collaboration with Stuff and Nonsense theatre company was something of a meeting of crazy minds, and SERIOUSLY fun! We jointly facilitated a series of workshops - three sessions each with three schools from Bridport, Poole, and Plymouth.

Chesil Class completed our Climate Change project at Parrett & Axe Primary school, with a complex tale starring Alex the Monkey. It featured crown theft, a stretch in boarding school, and a bullying snow wolf (out of its natural habitat due to climate change).

Our first ever KS1 storymaking workshop was with Reception and Year 1 class at Parrett & Axe, also marking the penultimate session in our Climate Change project with the whole school.

Kimmeridge, Lulworth, and Durdle Door classes at Parrett & Axe Primary put their creativity into turbo mode for our Climate Change storymaking workshops.