Smugglers, chocolate mud and concertina books

"But what kind of brown are you seeing?" asked Mr Hugh Bryden.  "It's chocolate brown mud!" replied the ten year old.  And it was.

I've just spent two wholly absorbing mornings working at Palnackie Primary School with Hugh B, developing creative connections between people and landscapes for the National Scenic Areas.  (More about National Scenic areas here).  Out we went to Palnackie's Millennium Viewpoint, where I got the children writing down a Word Landscape, and Hugh capped that easily by getting them waterpainting at 0 degrees C.  But it was a wide landscape filled with cool winter colour, and the kids produced wonders.

The following Friday it was my turn, and we created a whole group poem.  I read them extracts of John Clare, and Katrina Porteous' 'Dunstanburgh', and an extract from 'Lost at Sea'.  We talked about the history of Palnackie, and the secrets that were kept here.  (A lonely excise man lived in the village, surrounded by a thriving smuggling trade).  Here's the second stanza of their group poem:

The skeleton trees of winter shiver

at the Viewpoint.  Our fingers cold

as ice, we fit Kippford to Kirkennan
on paper.  Thin black lines

of hedges fence the fields.

The Urr sweeps its curves

in chocolate mud and the tide

brings silt to bury the harbour. 

I'm always impressed by the way children can make complex choices about language, making decisions on tense, when to strip out an adjective, which verb to choose. They capped each other's suggestions and worked energetically. 
Then the kids created their own poems, and 'published' them into hand-decorated concertina books: