CREATIVE WRITING DAY

First Form enjoyed visits from three authors

One of the highlights of the year in English is the annual visit of a host of children’s authors for the First Form Creative Writing Day. This year we welcomed Laura Mulch, Cliff McNish and Adam Baron. The boys enjoyed a variety of workshops to help them with aspects of their writing, and left each one bursting with enthusiasm and ideas. They learned how to avoid clichés when writing ghost stories, how to edit and adapt structure and sound in poetry, and how to collaborate to create some fantastically bonkers story openings! After lunch, the whole year group gathered in the School Library to hear the writers read from their own work, and a Q&A session. Plenty of schools have author visits, but very few have three in one day! The First Form were thoroughly engaged all day, and are looking forward to working on some of their ideas in their English lessons.

We had a creative writing day where we heard from three authors, Cliff McNish, Laura Mulcha and Adam Baron. We first went to Cliff McNish, who focused on taking a character, and developing it into a story. He chose for us to develop a ghost story, which I thoroughly enjoyed, while talking to us about how he gets the idea from his stories, which are just images that will pop into his head and he likes to flesh them out. Next on the list was Adam Baron, who taught us how to develop stories. Together, our class made quite a silly story, all while developing our skills. We gave our character hobbies and used these to help create our story. Finally, we went to see Laura Mulcha. She taught us about poems, and altogether we created quite an emotional poem about death. She also taught us about how not all poems have to rhyme, especially heartfelt ones. After all of the First Form classes had visited all the authors, they all came together to read extracts from their books or poems, and helped us further develop the ideas we came up with in their sessions. It was a very fun day!

Fionn, First Form