“Every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.” – United Union

Hello artcys,

According to the United Union around 6000 languages are endangered. For this reason, the International Mother language was created and has been around since February 2000.

Every year in February in Manchester there are many events happening to celebrate this special day. One of those events was happening at Longsight library. Through Edlab we had the opportunity to participate in the event not only by visiting the venue but by creating a workshop for the children there. Since we are doing poetry we were assigned to create a small workshop space where children would be able to come to sit and get inspired to write a poem either in English or in any other language they were comfortable with.  And our theme for the day: FOOD! The reason for that was the connection to another event happening the same evening called Manchester Mushaira that I will talk more about later.

Our workspace consisted of a long ‘dinner’ table with paper plates and many craft supplies. Children were able to come and sit at the table to create their poems, decorate them and then turn them into beautiful clouds. In order for the kids to create a poem, they had some options. One of them was using a template. Two templates were created by us students, one for younger children and one for older.
Their second option was a bag of wooden blocks where they could reach in and each of the blocks had inspirational food-related words for them to get inspired, and lastly, we had a (DIY) serving dome for the kids to imagine their favorite food inside and therefore get inspired to write. The poems were written on paper plates. After the children would finish their poem we had a tent where they could go inside to read their poem out loud and get filmed and praised, keep them to take them home or leave them to turn them into clouds that later hung upstairs to the event of the Manchester Mushaira.

This was a completely new experience for me as I have never done something similar before. It was inspiring to see such young people be able to write so beautifully. Children were producing poems non-stop without overthinking whether something is right or wrong. This made me wonder when adults say that poetry is hard and not many choose to write, is it because it is actually hard or is it because we think too much and all the magic goes away? Perhaps it’s because we try to make sense of everything or maybe because we don’t have much to talk about. Either way, it was exciting to see children be so willing to write. Especially when you give them a reason to. Children got to write their poem, decorate it, read it out loud. This gave them an opportunity to create.

This workshop that was created for the event was exceptionally successful and I hope students in this unit or similar will have similar opportunities in the future. As well as children who visit events like this, to be able to participate in workshops like this.

See you in the next one,
Antio!

Our ‘Dinner’ table