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Toni blogs about her second week of work experience

My second week at Yew Tree for work experience has gone ridiculously quick. We started on Monday by creating monsters and beasts for the Castle of Dreams project with reception children and (once I was off duty) devising the hilariously fabulous Dick Whittington and his Cat with Sapphire - which is coming along a treat! What seemed like no less than a day later I was saying goodbye and parting from Gemma as she headed for her weekend trip to the sea side.
So this week has mainly been about The Castle of Dreams project, except for Tuesday, when Sarah and Yew Tree were invited by the BBC to tell part of the story of the Summer at Nostell play 'Party at the End of the World' in one of their 'WW1 at Home' tents at the Great Yorkshire Show. The photos look great! And my day was spent at the Office, having quite a lot of fun myself, updating the Yew Tree scrapbooks.
On to the rest of the week! The Castle of Dreams project is run by the people at The Orangery and is to be performed at Sandal Castle in September, by people age 16+. The script will be inspired by the ideas of 4-19 year olds and the workshops we were doing were writing about dream castles, the beast of sandal castle, what the walls would say and basically anything imaginative that could fit in.
We worked with reception class to year 5s collecting their ideas and designs for things to put in the play. All the groups we worked with seemed to be really interested about the project and couldn't wait to put pen to paper. As expected there were some really clever ideas as well as quite amusing, although they were mostly clever and amusing!
All that's left to say is that I've learned so much from the last two weeks about how Yew Tree works and how drama is so useful. I thought it was also worth mentioning what Gemma pointed out on Friday as we left the primary school, that there was something quite poetic about Gemma being the first and last person I saw on work experience, quite coincidental since we haven't been together that many days. I'd also like to say a massive thank you to Sarah, Oz and everyone at Yew Tree for having me on work experience, it's been great! Even the thought of going back to school tomorrow feels strange!

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