8 Jan 2018

This week we celebrated the dawn of the new year by giving the groups an opportunity to catch up after the festive season. In total, we had the pleasure of celebrating with 39 participants across the 3 sessions; Stockton, Billingham and Thornaby.

We started each session with a comedic poem about the end of the festivities, entitled “In The Box”, which set the scene nicely for the end of the Christmas period. We kept our activities brief – based loosely on the ‘gratitude jar’, we asked each participant to complete the sentence provided on a slip of paper. Sentences ranged from asking people what their wishes were for the coming year, through to asking them what creative activities they like and why they feel happy. The best thing about this activity is that everyone took part. There are times when a small number of participants refuse to take part in the day’s activity, which is absolutely fine but everyone was in high spirits and happy to contribute something to our jar.

While people were completing their slips, they were also encouraged to talk about their sentence with the people sitting around them and to use the slips as a prompt for conversations. This seemed to go well and there was a nice ‘hum’ in the air at all three sessions.

Join us next week when we will be attempting to write a ‘tanka’ – a 31 syllable poem!