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World Book Day 2018

Story-telling adventures in Primary Schools!

[Meghan Zammit, Maya Lopes-Wilson, Luisa Hegewald, Alexis Anara, Mae Chaplin, Akia Seymour, d’Anne Tennant, Maria Parker-Rauw, Sanne Healy, Will Parrish, Brenten Handfield, Shawn Gardiner. Assisted by Ms Rankin, Lesley Stevenson and Lisa Cavendar].

A group of Year 9 students volunteered to work with Ms Rankin and create our stories to be taken and read to students at local Primary Schools in celebration of World Book Day. In the weeks running up to March 1st, we met several times to share ideas with the team and read parts of the stories we were writing. In the final stages, once the stories had been completed and checked, we met to work on delivering our readings in an appropriate and animated way – developing use of some intriguing voices for our characters!

When World Book Day finally arrived and we were driving down to our first stop, Ianthe Pratt, we were feeling slightly nervous because we did not know what to expect.  Many questions were going through our heads: were we going to win the audience’s attention? Or were we going to crash and burn! When Brenten, Will and I got to our first audience, all our worries disappeared: they loved the stories, and the fact that we were there to visit them.

All the groups performing their stories focused very hard on adopting the voices and mannerisms of the characters we had written into our narratives; this definitely helped to produce great reactions to the comedy we planted throughout the tales, and getting a room of students we didn’t know to laugh made us more confident. (Little did we know, one of our most well received performances had actually been to a group of students who usually have issues with paying attention in class! We had done something that made them happy and this made us feel as if we had done something great).

Our second stop at Provo Primary School provided very different audiences to the first school: these guys were having their own World Book Day celebrations and they were all dressed up! The smaller classes were also less daunting. Performing our stories several times over was pretty exhausting, but when we had finished reading our stories we were riddled with questions from the Year 5 and 6 students. The questions were mostly about our high school lives and what it is really like to be at BWIC: this reminded me of my when I was in primary school, because I was just as enthusiastic and curious about what came next.

This was a great experience for the students who participated – for the readers as well as the listeners. Many teachers who heard our stories suggested that we publish them in a book (more on that from Ms Rankin at a later date!). This experience is has encouraged us and given us more ideas, as well as helping us to realize what a positive impact we can have by sharing our time with other local schools.

 

Shawn Gardiner Jr. & Ms Rankin.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_masonry_media_grid grid_id=”vc_gid:1521505412637-3fdb0d58-297e-9″ include=”2489,2490,2491,2492,2493,2494,2495,2496,2497,2499,2500,2501,2502,2503,2504,2505,2506,2507,2508,2509,2510,2511,2512,2513,2514,2515,2516,2517,2518,2519,2520,2521,2522″][/vc_column][/vc_row]