This week, we started to think about ideas for narratives based around our inquiry focus of ‘what would a city of the future look like?’. Inspired by science fiction, we first looked at images of imagined futuristic cities as prompts and brainstormed what problems and solutions we could write about in the plot of our story. Here are some of the ideas that students came up with:
There will not be phones anymore because there won’t be anymore indium. How will we communicate?
Robots that we invented are taking over the city and turning humans into slaves.
Too much pollution and everyone has to stay inside.
All of the electronic cars have suddenly have stopped working.
The futuristic buildings are starting to break down.
There is a poison that spreads around the city and the poison makes everyone go back to the past.
Next, we started to think about building our vocabulary of descriptive language to help us when we are writing about our future city. Our focus this week was on describing settings, first brainstorming a collection of adjectives in small groups using a picture prompt and a mind map as a way to organise our thinking.
Next, as whole workshop groups, we created a paragraph that introduced the setting of a narrative, based on three different futuristic city picture prompts. We used the descriptive language that we had brainstormed on our mind maps. This was alot of fun and left us thinking about what could happen next in each story. Keep your eyes peeled in the neighbourhood to see how our narratives develop over the term!
It was a beautiful evening with a dazzling sunset that turned the sky a mix of dark and light blue, fading pink, bright yellow, and blushing orange. The bright lights from the buildings looked tiny from where I was looking out over the city. It was magical! Standing on my balcony, I could see millions of roads and pathways that looked alive because of all the moving cars with their headlights on.
It was one very fine afternoon in a futuristic city similar to Songdo. I looked out my bedroom window into the beautiful, pale blue sky and was surprised to see not a cloud in sight. But what I did see what the very busy city square, abuzz with activity. The oval shaped stadium was finally finished being built and the glowing blue holographic screens had been turned on to advertise the opening ceremony starting at 7pm tonight.
A beautiful, clear, still lake caught my eye on my journey home from my first day at my new school. I was looking forward to swimming in this lake because it was an extremely hot day, but first I needed to ride my bike on the enormous freeway that stretched over the whole city. In my head, I was already regretting my decision to take a short cut on the dangerous, death-defying, zero gravity freeway home, so I distracted myself by admiring the view. It made me remember how polluted my old city was compared to this astonishingly clean and sustainable place.