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Next week I am working with Deansbrook Junior School. I have worked here many times and always love it. It is a school that always wants to think of different ways to inspire and engage everyone. Our focus is the natural world and we are travelling to the beautiful Walton On The Naze on the Essex Coast. It is an incredibly wild place considering it is relatively close to London. Our focus for the visits will be awareness. If we stop and pay attention to what is all around us we will discover hundreds of ideas. These are the food of the creative mind. Human beings are curious and we will be tapping into this innate part of the human spirit.
Walton On The Naze - wild and wordy!
One of the activities that I am really looking forward to is trying to gather sounds. All too often we visit a place and see things but miss the sounds that identify where we are. This sonic identity fascinates.
I intend to stop at three places during our walk. We will listen and write down what we hear. We will then think about how we can describe the sounds that we can hear. This language of Subjective audio qulaity is a wonderful thing to explore. And children love it.
We need words beyond onomatopoeia to describe sounds. We can explore the quality of the sound. We can focus on pitch, dynamic, duration. We can describe the material - woody, airy, metallic, glassy.
The speed of the sound and even the texture and the colour.
This exploration of sound forces us to be creative with language. It encourages us to dig deep and discover new ways of explaining things. It demands synonyms. It is personal to the listener and gives a sense of real achievement when reading out the descriptions someone says
'Oh yeah, I SEE what you mean!.'