Creative Coaching at Central Normal School Day 3 & 4

Day 3

We had a week off last week, as the school had sports and it wasn’t going to work, so the children had had nearly two weeks to finish their writing and put the page numbers in. Tracye asked for a show of hands of who had finished, and only two hands went up. The rest were delivered a most impressive bollicking, she was not amused. They were tough kids though, no one dissolved and we got on with the writing and made some good progress. I think I need some bollicking lessons from Tracye, maybe I’d get things cleaned up faster round here at home. Some kids were having trouble with their rhyme, and were making up the rhyme before they thought of what they really wanted to say, and a few others were compromising on grammar for the sake of a rhyming word. We did some work on that, and one or two dispensed with the rhyme – one just used a little rhyming refrain that worked really well.

Day 4

Quite a few students had their stories typed up and printed off, and it was easy for them to see how it was working as a story. We checked grammar and changed some things, got language a bit tighter, and looked at things that connected within the stories, such as whether their characters were consistent. I think by next week every student will have a complete story ready to start illustrating – one is going to work with me by e-mail to get it finished. We talked about thinking about how their characters will look, and how to get another layer of story over the top of their words with the illustrations, instead of just drawing exactly what the words said. It was interesting to look at their stories at this stage now, and compare them to what they had started with. There is so much more personality in them now that they’ve invented new characters and thought about them.

I feel pretty confident that we’ll get finished by the deadline, though that might be because we’ve got the writing sorted, and that’s usually the end of my major effort – perhaps I’m just a little ignorant about this illustrating business!

Diana Neild