Chapter 1: Author visit #1 & Matilda!
This week is Winston Book Week, a whole week of book and reading themed events to celebrate World Book Day (Thursday 7th March). The week started off with a busy day on Tuesday 5th March with an author visit for Year 8 students and a theatre trip for Year 7 in the evening.
The new display has gone up in the Library with a variety of different shoes to represent our Book Week theme of 'Take a walk in someone else's shoes'. Our focus is Reading for Empathy and trying to understand the emotions and feelings of the characters in stories.
Our visiting author, Eve Ainsworth, gave an assembly to all Year 8 students telling them about her journey into writing and the inspiration behind some of her books. She talked about her childhood and how that had an impact on what kind of books she wanted to write. Her books delve into a lot of real life issues like school and bullying. She also told the story of the Dick Kerr girls' football team and how that is the inspiration behind one of her other series of books. It was really interesting to hear the true story that inspired some of her books.
She then led a creative writing workshop with 2 groups of Year 8 students, which focused on how to create a fully developed character for a story and how this can actually be the starting point when writing a story. The students were given a picture of a person and Eve asked them questions in a sequence which they had to answer, which in turn meant that they ended up with a whole background story for the character. Even though all the students had the same picture, each character that was created was completely individual and the students' ideas were incredibly creative! Lots of students in the workshops said they would be keen to continue with their character's story which is exciting!
Some Year 8 students have been doing a response task this morning and I wanted to share some of the author fact file work they did which will be going up on display in the Library!
A huge thank you to Eve for coming to Winston, and we look forward to our next author visit on Friday 8th March for Year 7 students. There will be some more photos from the workshops coming soon this week!
On Tuesday evening, a group of 39 Year 7 students travelled to London by coach with some teachers to watch the West End production of Matilda. For some students it was their first West End experience which was extremely exciting and Matilda is a fantastic show. The students were fabulous representatives of Winston and very much enjoyed the show!
Watch this space for the next chapter of Winston Book Week coming soon...
