Keeper of the Realms Author Inspires Imagination at Homefield

17 Nov 2016

Marcus Alexander, author of the popular Keeper of the Realms series, visited Homefield recently to deliver a dynamic assembly on imagination to the entirety of the senior department.

To begin with, Marcus spoke to the audience about his experiences travelling, meeting new people and tasting different foods, showing himself to be quite the adventurer. He also told the enraptured boys about his love of extreme sports and showed them a few pictures of him in action. No doubt the boys would have seen some exciting gymnastic moves were it not for the fact that Marcus has recently injured his arm and is awaiting surgery.

Marcus’s engaging, young and all-embracing style hit the right note with the Homefield pupils and this helped to give a lot of weight to his key message, namely to focus on having as many experiences as possible so that our imaginations have something to draw on.

Then it was over to the boys as Marcus challenged them to start using their own imaginations. Initially, he tasked them with an ‘imagination workout’, where the students were required to come up with as many creative ideas in three minutes for what two dice could be used for. However, the limitation was that they could only use four words for each idea. This really pushed the boys but they came out with some wonderfully creative suggestions. Next, Marcus introduced Jensen de Willow, a fictional character which the boys were asked to create from scratch. Marcus wanted to know lots of details about the character, like whether he was good or bad, rich or poor, what he did for a living, whether he had any enemies etc. The boys were given 15 minutes and, as before, delivered some fantastically imaginative responses.

This was a hugely worthwhile exercise for everyone involved and the pupils certainly responded well to Marcus’s techniques. They came away knowing the value of brainstorming and just how far their imaginations can stretch when challenged.