Below are a number of writing activities relating to Pool of Memories to use with pupils:
Baths accounts
Imagine you can travel back in time to 1907 when the baths first opened. Using information on the Pool of Memories and Moseley Road Baths websites and your own experiences of the pool, see if you can paint a picture in words of what it was like the first day the baths opened. You could imagine you were a child going to swim in the pool for the first time, or a child going to have a bath or someone writing about the opening for the local newspaper.
Swimming rules
Imagine you are in charge of Moseley Road Baths, what rules would you have for swimmers using the pool, how would you like them to behave in the building? Create your own rules as a poster to be hung on the wall in the baths.
Guided tour
Using the virtual guided tour online at www.moseleyroadbaths.co.uk script a guided tour to accompany the images. Practice giving the guided tour around your classroom in pairs.
As an extension imagine you are some of the different people you met in Pool of Memories. How would they describe the baths, how would their language be different, which bit of the baths would they want to give a tour of?
Voices from the past
Pool of Memories is based on the real life experiences of people who have swum, bathed and worked at Moseley Road Baths over the many years that it has been open. Some of the things that the characters say in the programme are the actual words of real people.
Using some if the actual text spoken by these people (included below), take children on a guided imaginative journey. Put some music on, get children to lie down, close their eyes and as they listen to you speaking the words, get them to imagine floating on their backs in a pool.
Afterwards ask them how they felt, what they saw, what sounds they could hear etc.
This time ask them to picture a time that they went swimming and to remember in as much detail as they can that moment.
Use these experiences as the basis for writing, perhaps to create a sensory poem.
“A beautiful moment I think is when everyone’s got out and the water starts calming down and the sun is streaming through the roof “
“It’s the sound…it echoes and is very peaceful…a slight churchy feeling with the vaulted ceilings. It’s calm and relaxing. It’s almost meditative, you just concentrate on your breathing and movements and all your cares and worries disappear”
“I could sit on the bottom about 7 – 8 foot down. I used to just breathe in and go and sit on the bottom, open my eyes and just look at the glint in the water”
“Closing my eyes I forgot where I was and I was somewhere else”
