Roald Dahl, William Wordsworth and the Excess of Imagination: Literacy Week 2022!
This year’s literacy week kicked off with our traditional activity, celebrating imagination and creating worlds through language. Grouped within their Houses, students across classes 6 to 12, wrote a story each to the suspense-building prompt, “No one knew of her whereabouts.” The stories went through diligent and strict judging and the winning House was Dragons.
The classroom doors were decked with teachers’ favorite poems, ranging from unlikely choices such as James Douglas Morrison, the leader of the 1960s American rock band, the Doors — but a poet in his own right — to the more traditional offerings of Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, to poets not often included in the Secondary School curriculum, such as Charles Bukowski, and those like the Chinese poet, Li Bai, of whom we know less because we often do not cross the linguistic and cultural border.
The culmination of celebrating literacy took place in the theater where all students read the grim and gruesome story by Roald Dhal, “The Man on the Moon,” completing a time-pressured task of transforming the story into first haikus and then a haiku series, called the renga. Students worked as Houses, writing, creating, and discussing. The theater was abuzz with students counting syllables and trying ways to manipulate language to fit the demanding and unforgiving haiku pattern of 5-7-5 syllables per line. The most aesthetically pleasing renga was written by the Unicorns, who also won the final challenge of the day — a fast-paced quiz on William Wordsworth’s poem “We are Seven”.
Through play and learning, students had the opportunity to read, exercise their imagination, and work closely with language to create worlds of their own. Do not fret, both the House story and the renga will be published in this school year’s edition of Chiasmus, so you will all have the pleasure of reading their work. A literary success!
