Pushkin – Literacy Unit

Writing Task – all groups

Theme: ‘The Spark of Stillness’

Day 5

Continuing with our thinking around stillness and sounds we are now going to try and match these ideas to the natural world around us.

‘A seed grows with no sound but a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence …. Grow silently.’

• What do you think this quotation might mean?
• What things can be destroyed and how can they be destroyed? For example, mankind can destruct! Make a list!
• Consider times of great destruction that you may have heard of, seen or read about. What sort of noises accompany destruction? Make a list!
• Watch these two very short You Tube videos:

• Think about the silence of one and the noise of the other! How does this make you think about the relevance/ importance of the quote mentioned above?
• Create a cloud/thought bubble! Inside it write down some positive statements of taking time to be still and time to reflect in quiet moments. For example, what does it allow you to do or be? This could simply be five or six lines in total but there is no limit.
• In your imagination let the cloud float away and now just relax!

Day 6

• Choose a scene that may be more familiar to you, for example, forest, beach or whatever you prefer.
• Brainstorm all the things within the scene that could be moving.
• Use videos or clips of the scene, dictionaries and thesaurus as needed to help identify suitable verbs (doing words).

For example, making out a table format could be useful for recording:

• Aim for about ten things moving and then list around three movements.
• After you have written a range of verbs to suggest the movements in your scene, freeze your chosen scene in your mind.
• Create another similar table using the same list of‘things’ as before.
• Under the ‘movements’ column, change the action/doing word to a still, motionless word. You might use prefixes, suffixes, adding ‘less’ or just a total word opposite.

For example:

• Pair up a selection of nouns and verbs from both tables as this will give you building blocks for some phrases on noises and stillness, for example:

Trees bending, bowing, waving

Trees unbending, upright, standing

• In the writing process you would then return to this and add adjectives and other parts of speech to develop the theme but you do not need to go any further now!!!