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Many thanks to Alan Gibbons for a fantastic day!

Students from Year 5 to 7 enjoyed an Author Talk from Alan in the morning. They really enjoyed his sense of humour and also finding out about how he became a writer.

Year 8 students had Creative Writing Sessions and wrote the beginnings of stories about vampires and werewolves – scary stuff!

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Alan Gibbons’ Day

These are some of the comments from our Year 8 students:

“He taught me how to make simple sentences interesting”.

“The bit I liked most was writing the story. It really helped with my skills.”

“It was interesting and fun at the same time.”

“He helped me realise that you can’t just run into the exciting part of the story and that each little bit is just as important.”

“Alan has a good sense of humour and I liked how he did impressions.”

“I really liked his sense of humour and the way he spoke was so inspiring. I liked how he could make up a great story in a couple of paragraphs.”

“He was funny and made me laugh. I think the writing task was OK.”

“…he explained it (the writing task) well and interacted with you and he knew what way we wanted to hear it, not the boring long way.”

These are some of the comments from our Year 7 students:

“He was funny and seemed to be passionate about his writing. When he was talking about the different genres he seemd to have written loads.”

“I liked his humour and jokes, especially when he was talking about his life and book awards.”

“He was funny and he was very inspirational. I think the way he told us about each book was very helpful.”

“I really liked how he was really funny when he described his childhood and how he described his books.”

“He was funny and I thought he was going to be boring but he wasn’t. He was easy to listen to.”

“I liked that he was really happy and he told us about his past. I liked that he told us about his books.”

“… it was action packed, funny and dealt well with the questions.” “Rating out of 10 – 100!”

“He was hilarious and made me cry laughing!”

“Overall it was great.”

written by Mrs Robinson \\ tags: authors, books, reading, writing

Here are the photographs from our fantastic Write Path session, which I wrote about previously.

Here are the links to the stories. Our students worked in pairs to write a paragraph, collaborating on stories with schools from around the world. Please read them and tell us what you think! The names in the links belong to the authors who started each story.

Story started by Alex Milway

Story started by Catherine Fisher

Story started by Joanne Harris

Story started by Jo Craig

Story started by Penny Dolan

Story started by Pete Johnson

written by Mrs Robinson \\ tags: English, special events, Write Path, writing

We had an amazing hour in the Library this morning and Mrs Robinson is exhilarated and proud as punch after taking part in Write Path for the first time! All we can say is “Can we do it again next year, please?”.

Write Path is an annual event aiming to encourage connections with students around the world through the means of a collaborative story writing activity. This year, Write Path is taking place over two weeks with over 60 schools from a wide range of countries taking part.

 The organiser has been able to enlist the support of some fantastic authors and poets.  They will each write a story or poem “starter”. Each day, six of these are available and the students then write the next paragraph (up to 250 words) so that the story/poem progresses during the day. These are then uploaded to a collaborative website so that everyone can see. The last school each day finishes the story/poem. Each school gets one slot during the two weeks.

 The English Department here were so helpful, choosing the 12 students from Year 7, organising a teacher to help out, getting hold of some Sixth Formers who also encouraged and supported the younger students and much more. Thanks so much!

 The students themselves were brilliant – taking to the whole idea with cries of “Awesome”, particularly when told that the finished stories would be published in book form. They were up and running very quickly, and worked fantastically well. We were amazed at their flexibility when some of the paragraphs from the school before us popped up half way through our session – they simply adjusted what they had written. Our Sixth Form students helped some of the Year 7s with typing and kept them focussed on the task – huge thanks to them too!

A fantastic hour!

written by Mrs Robinson \\ tags: English, international, literacy, special events, students, Write Path, writing