July 2015 has a busy month in the English Department at Sir Thomas Rich. We decided to end the academic year with a bang and not a whimper! Our first event was a theatre workshop based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for Year 7, devised and organised by Mrs Jones and Miss Wells. The day kicked off with our Year 10 GCSE Drama students performing a reduced version of the entire play. Then, all Year 7 pupils were involved in a range of workshop activities in the morning, before splitting into performance groups at lunchtime. Activities ranged from physical theatre to slapstick comedy as boys discovered more about the worlds of the lovers, the fairies and the rude mechanicals. The devised performances in the afternoon saw every Year 7 boy on stage, with the Year 10 Drama students working as directors. Will Morgan wrote: 'I personally enjoyed the whole day in different ways as I was intrigued about how Shakespeare came up with this play and its characters. I also enjoyed the different techniques we learnt, as you realise how much thought goes into a short sketch by comedians.'

Children and Young Adult fiction writer, Julia Golding, led a group of gifted writers from Years 7,8 and 9 in a writers' workshop on Thursday 9^th July. The brief was to challenge our able writers to produce a short story with the title 'Transformation.' Boys took part in a range of inspirational activities in the morning (for example, writing a paragraph without the letter S and creating Top Trumps cards to aid characterisation) and also asked lots of questions about the process of writing a novel and getting it published. Boys spent the afternoon crafting their stories and Mrs Saunders is now in the process of reading them and deciding the prize-winner: more news on this later!