Ahmed Knowmadic Ali volunteering at a community BBQ

Workshop

School Community Builder.

Students imagine the school is alive. What would the front doors say? What does the gym floor remember? Their lines become one poem for the whole school.

Ask about this workshop

All workshops

Community BBQ

Who it’s for

Good for

Elementary classrooms, school-wide belonging work, welcome weeks, community-building days, and groups that need collaborative writing.

Grades

Grades K-6

What you keep

A collective poem that can be displayed, performed, or used as a shared classroom/school statement.

Skills

What students practice.

Shift from individual performance to community synthesis

Students write from a shared prompt while preserving individual voice inside a collective poem.

Use personification to give a school or classroom a voice

Giving the hallway or the gym floor a voice lets students say things about their school they might not say as themselves.

Name shared values in student language

Students name what their school stands for in their own words, not the ones on the posters.

Build a performance that includes many voices

Built through arranging individual lines into a shared reading order and rehearsing the group delivery together.

The session

From many lines to one poem.

Gather: collect what the school/community sees, hears, remembers, and hopes
Personify: write as if the school or classroom could speak
Compose: combine student lines into a collective poem
Share: perform or display the final piece

Curriculum connections

Language Arts, Social Studies, Health, belonging, citizenship, empathy, collaboration, speaking, and listening.

From my worksheet

If the front doors of our school could talk, they would say _____.
The gym floor remembers the time when _____.
If the hallway had a heartbeat, it would beat like _____.

Booking

Book School Community Builder.

It works for one class or the whole school. Tell me your grades, dates and location.

Start a booking enquiry

See residencies