The Special Correspondence Club

Dear Year 5 pupils,

  Can you help me? I'm looking for a class in an inner city school and a class in a rural school for my next project with Foursight Theatre. I want to work with children who:  

      - are interested in making new friends with other children their age 

     -  want to explore and share who they are
     - are curious and willing to take risks

Are you interested? It will be like going on an adventure together. We don't really know what will happen. Your job will be to think about what we could do together.  That's what will make it exciting: your ideas, your imaginations, and seeing how you connect with the children in the other school.

So, what do you think?

Inspired by our latest national touring theatre production, Can Any Mother Help Me?, Foursight's Learning & Participation Co-ordinator, Lisa Harrison, has been working on an exchange project between two primary school classes, one in West Park school - urban, multicultural Wolverhampton - and one in rural Shropshire. The children from the two classes began by writing a series of letters to each other and worked with a poet, a photographer and a drama practitioner to create personal portraits of themselves which they then exchanged with the other school.

The project has been investigating the concepts of prejudice, assumptions, cliches and difference by working with the pupils on their expectations and thoughts about the other group. The Special Correspondence Club culminates with two days of exchange, including a welcome ceremony for their correspondence club friends, bhangra and maypole dancing, welcome snacks, a drama performance that the pupils have created to share with the other class, teachers and parents, and a trip to West Park and the Priory, Much Wenlock.

You can read Lisa Harrison's blog entry from 12th August 2009 about the project by clicking here .