Settle Stories - bringing a wonderful Yorkshire dialect archive alive!
“Brilliant workshops this week! Absolutely cracking! I really enjoyed working with you – and experiencing your imaginative poetry activities that really inspired the children’s creativity.”
Gillian Waters, Archive Project Officer, Settle Stories
I was appointed by Settle Stories as their poet to work with Settle schoolchildren over the summer term to help them explore the wonderfully diverse world of Yorkshire dialect poetry. The children developed their own Stone Age language, did raiding parties on each others stores of Norse, Saxon, Pictish, Irish, Roman and Norman French words, and generally had a lot of fun learning to use their own dialects - from the distant past, right up to present Twitter-dialect! We used the metaphor of a wall of words to pull all our ideas together - and the kids even got the chance to rebuild on of their school's dry-stone walls as part of the work they did with me!
We worked with Bill Mitchell's fabulous archive of recorded materials from elderly Dales residents in the 1970s and '80s. This helped the children tap into their great-great grandparents' language, and learn the importance of the feel of words in your mouth - as well as on the page.
Gillian Waters, Archive Project Officer, Settle Stories
I was appointed by Settle Stories as their poet to work with Settle schoolchildren over the summer term to help them explore the wonderfully diverse world of Yorkshire dialect poetry. The children developed their own Stone Age language, did raiding parties on each others stores of Norse, Saxon, Pictish, Irish, Roman and Norman French words, and generally had a lot of fun learning to use their own dialects - from the distant past, right up to present Twitter-dialect! We used the metaphor of a wall of words to pull all our ideas together - and the kids even got the chance to rebuild on of their school's dry-stone walls as part of the work they did with me!
We worked with Bill Mitchell's fabulous archive of recorded materials from elderly Dales residents in the 1970s and '80s. This helped the children tap into their great-great grandparents' language, and learn the importance of the feel of words in your mouth - as well as on the page.
