Second day at St James School Aranui

9th August 2010 - I spent the 2nd and much more constructive day with the group of young writers at St James School Aranui. Their teacher, Judy Parry, is keen to include a fantasy story about vegetables and gardens into the book that the group is writing about growing an edible garden. I think this is a good idea too. It will lighten the contents and most likely make the final product more interesting to other readers. However, this is creating quite a challenge for the group that I am working with. They have all written stories but most of them wander all over the place and are not very interesting yet. I don't think these children are strong readers so they have very few role models for good story telling or just writing in general. We started todays session with looking at the structure of a story - the beginning, the middle and the end. We agreed that a good story often introduces a character or characters in the first part. A problem or some other incident happens in the second part and the the resolution takes place in the third part. The group spent about an hour writing new stories with this structure in mind. Judy and I moved around the room helping where we could. Some of the children filled a couple of pages in an exercise book very quickly. They seemed to be grabbing ideas from what they could hear being discussed around them. Vegetables having a hard time with monsters and sometimes werewolves cropped up in a lot of stories.

In the second half of the morning I spent time with each member of the group individually. I wrote a list of questions about their stories that they are to thing about and answer before I see them again on Friday.

Gavin Bishop