We were very fortunate to have Lou Treleaven visiting our school on Monday. Lou writes picture books, junior fiction and early readers published by Maverick Arts Publishing. She spent the day with us to run very exciting workshops on story telling.
In the morning, she led a storytime workshop for Kindergarten, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. Lou read some of her books: Not Yet a Yeti, The Snowflake Mistake, Professor McQuark and the Oojamaflip and The Snugglewump. In between, she taught the children an action rhyme for Not Yet a Yeti (Lou wore Yeti slippers and Yeti-like hat), they sang a song based on Twinkle Twinkle for The Snowflake Mistake, discussed possible new inventions Professor McQuark could make, and sang a song about friendship.
After that fun session, Mrs Treleaven did workshops for Year 3 and the Upper School. The children worked on creating stories using the exciting locations we are studying this term. Year 3’s were about a tsunami, Year 4’s stories were set in the desert, Year 5’s in the rainforest and Year 6’s on the raging river.
Lou had read different extracts from books (Tsunami! – Japanese story by Kimiko Kajkawa with Year 3, Survivors by David Long with Year 4, The Explorer by Katherine Rundell with Year 5 and 6) and they talked about the sort of words that can be used to describe the location to create a word bank. They then drew on elements from the plot creation workshop to discuss how a plot is created by putting together setting, characters and a problem. Lou showed the children how to use a random plot generator and a dice to create ideas, and they had a go at making one using different settings (desert, rainforest, etc).
The children will write their stories in English and we will be holding a writing competition which Lou will judge a couple of weeks afterwards.
