REPRINT OF AN ARTICLE WHICH APPEARED IN "ENGLISH IN WALES" NEWSLETTER, WINTER 1999
Once upon a time, I was a writer who occasionally "work-shopped" in schools. During the Year of Reading, I became a work-shopper who occasionally wrote! Since September 1998 I have visited well over 50 schools for a day, a week, or more, and travelled all over Wales. I thought that once the Year ended, life would quieten a little, but October and half of November 1999 were fully booked by the end of July.
Work-shopping is addictive. There's nothing quite like the buzz of having two different groups of children a day - some I'm sad to see go, some I'm not! But to have a child give me a huge, wordless hug at the end of a session, or announce "I'm ever so glad you came in today, Miss. We'd have had to do English all day otherwise" make up for the (very) occasional deadly days.
Building a rapport
Once I am with the group (preferably no more than 15, and with a teacher joining in - NOT catching up on marking) my first task is to build up a rapport with the children, relax them, and get their minds into imaginative mode.
One of the most "fun" sessions I've had this year was with a class of Y3 children from St Peter's, London Dock, when the teacher (my eldest daughter) and I divided the class and spent fifteen minutes creating a monster each. We then drew our respective monsters, wrote poems about them, and finally I set the children to begin writing stories about them. The stories were weird, wonderful, and vividly reflected the multi-cultural population of the school. Oh, and we all giggled a lot.
My methods are simple: I give the children plenty of stimulation, just enough input to get their imaginations working, and set a problem which can be solved in a variety of ways so that the group usually produces fifteen different pieces of writing. I ask them to imagine a place or a feeling or a character, encourage them to "get inside" the characters they create so that they know how they will react to a given situation, and above all I try to make the sessions fun.
In an ideal world, all children would have access to books and writing materials and boundless encouragement to explore their own creativity. Part of the visiting writer's job is to "sell" the children the joys of reading and writing for enjoyment's sake, as something that is fun, and not just "school subjects". I read passages from my own and other writers' work to help an idea or project along - always stopping at an exciting point, of course, to encourage the children to read the rest of the story or book themselves.
I try to end each visit with a short session in which I tell the children about my own writing, and answer the questions that invariably bubble up throughout the day. These are usually intelligent, funny, rewarding and occasionally mind-boggling, and I answer as honestly as I can. (Even "How much do you earn, Miss'?")
Reflections
Some schools do everything right. (They know who they are!) Some seem to do everything wrong, so that I pitch up on the first morning to be confronted by a class of kids who think I am a supply teacher because no one has bothered to tell them otherwise. Sometimes a teacher will disappear the instant my session starts, making follow-up work difficult. On one occasion, despite an enthusiastic head teacher, the class teacher greeted me with "Oh, god, not another bloody writer. You're always under our feet." And yes, there are schools that are written into my little black book with "never again" next to them in large red letters, but they are fortunately few.
The huge majority of visits are rewarding and exciting. To have a teacher say, at the end of the session "I can't believe how much that child has written! If I get two good lines out of him (or her) in a day I think I'm lucky!"
Funnily enough, so do I!
Jenny Sullivan
Fiction from Jenny Sullivan
All published by Pont Books
Following Blue Water £4.95
The Magic Apostrophe £5.95
The lsland of Summer £4.95
Dragonson £4.95
The Back End of' Nowhere £4.95
Nowhere again £5.95
Who, me? £4.95
Me and My Big Mouth £4.95
Dragons and Decisions £4.95
Gwydion and the Flying Wand £3.95*
Magic Maldwyn £3.95
Betsan the Brave £3.95
A Guardian What? £4.99*
Celtic Heroines £4.95
Tirion’s Secret Journal £4.99 ~ Winner, Tir na n-Og Award 2006
Nobody Asked Me! £5.99
Troublesome Thomas £4.99 ~ companion book to Tirion’s Secret Journal
Coming Soon:
What Part of No Don’t You
Understand?
Tree of Light
Gwydion’s Quest
Stories appear in The Biue Man and Other Stories from Wales* (£4.50); Old
Enough and Other Stories (£4.50) and Dragondays
(£9.99)
Poems appear in Say That Again, (£4.95); Thoughts Like an Ocean (£5.95)*; Look Out! (£4.95); A Seaside Treat (£5.95); Second Thoughts (£5.95) and Poems of Love and Longing (£7.99) .
Plays appear in 'Can I be the Ghost?' (£4), and 'A Gift for St David's Day' (£9.99). There's also a version of 'Sion and the Bargain Bee' in play form.
Teachers: Publications marked * have Very Useful classroom notes available from the nice people at Pont.
I am always pleased to visit schools, colleges, libraries and other venues
throughout Wales via the Writers on Tour scheme administered by Academi, which
offers part-payment of fees charged. Information on this scheme is available on
the internet ~ www.dspace.dial.pipex.com/academi. If you'd like me to visit
your school, please contact me first by e-mail ~ robjen@wanadoo.fr ~ to ensure that the
required date is available.
As well as facilitating workshops with children, I am also experienced in INSET training for qualified teachers and workshops for student teachers, and adult workshops on writing for, or working with, children. Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales, based at David Lloyd George’s old home at Llanystumdwy, has this year opened its doors to Y6 primary school children. The centre can take 16 (well behaved and responsible!) children, Monday afternoon to Friday morning, for an intensive (and fun) creative writing course, which can be part funded by a grant from the W H Smith Trust. For further information contact Sally Baker at Ty Newydd on 01766 522811.
For further details of the Writers on Tour scheme, contact Bob Mole at Academi on 029 2049 2266.
Visits to Schools
and Libraries
Some of my 'regular' schools
and libraries may have wondered if I've dropped off the planet…
Well, I haven't, but I am now
living in France., but I return to Wales on a regular basis, approximately
every three or four months, and would be delighted to undertake school visits
during those periods. I am very keen to keep my links with the children of
Wales, and am also available for adult groups for talks.
See the contacts page contact.htm for details.
Jenny Sullivan PhD, MA, FRSA