Year 10 Students Help Acclaimed Teen Author

Year 10 students Kyra and Aston spent an enjoyable day at Rudyard Kipling Primary School recently, helping younger students as part of an Able Writers’ Workshop.

 

Pupils from the Deans Partnership came together to take part in the workshop, led by acclaimed author Matt Whyman.  Matt has written widely for many audiences across a range of subjects in fiction, advice columns and memoirs, including the amusing true story of family life with pets in Walking with Sausage Dogs.

 

Matt helped the pupils to learn some key writing skills and styles, as well as useful interviewing techniques, such as how to ask ‘open’ rather than ‘closed’ questions.  “This was very helpful,” Longhill student Aston told us.  “For example, when speaking to witnesses, we learnt how to ask questions that would encourage them to give us more information.”

 

Aston went on to explain, “We worked in a classroom that was set up as a newsroom and we had various stories happening that we used role play to act out.  There was one about a football being kicked through a window and I had to interview witnesses to the incident.”

 

Another story involved reporting on a UFO which had landed on the school field at Rudyard!  This story was so exciting that the pupils worked in groups on their reports and then a member of each group read these out in a school assembly.

 

Year 6 pupil Dylan, who attends Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, told us, “I really enjoyed the Able Writers’ Workshop because it gave me an idea of what journalism is.  I found it fun pretending to be in a newsroom, interviewing people from a suspicious crime scene.”

 

The whole day sounds like a really interesting and exciting one – well done to everyone who took part and thanks to Rudyard Kipling Primary for inviting our Longhill students!

 

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