BOOKSCAPE PROJECT – Oral Poetry for Elderly People

By R. Liaw

U6 W(N) Tutorial – The pupils responsible for Bookscape. From left to right: Joao Pedro Eloy, Manuela de Moraes, Antonio Massimo Remsen, João Paulo Prado, Antonio Janér, Rafaella Liaw, Taiki Chan.

The beginning and our goals: 
The Lower 6 Windsor North tutorial inherited the project from pupils that have already graduated to work on it together. Our goal is to provide elderly people with access to short literary texts. This includes poems, short stories and song lyrics. 
 
How the project works and my role as leader: 
The leaders coordinate and select one text per person per month in the tutorial, sending everyone a file with their respective task. Members then record a voice thread reading the text aloud and send it to us, which we then upload to the website. We try to create the most accessible and user-friendly experience possible. Leaders then send the link to the person responsible for the elderly home so the elderly people there can enjoy the content at any time they wish! As a leader, it is my job to communicate with the elderly home, decide which poem each member will read, manage the website and deal with any problems that may arise. 
 
What we will do to develop it: 
Our tutorial brainstormed new ideas we could include this year to grow the project and make it more versatile, like including recorded songs to the website, whether that be sung or played with an instrument. We would also like to add activities such as yoga audio instructions and meditation so they can follow along. Most of all, we want to spread our cause and make the project more well-known within the school community through the publication of articles, videos, and making presentations in possible service fairs. This way, others can understand what we do and can contribute to the project if they wish! This has already happened during CAS day 2021 – pupils from Forms 3 and 4 had an allocated time to select, record, and send us oral poetry to be uploaded in the website. 
 
This is our website in which we upload the poems: https://bookscape.wixsite.com/website-1/poemas 
 
If you would like to help, learn more about the project, or have any ideas, please do not hesitate to contact myself or my co-leader: [email protected] and [email protected]