Gazette article for Devonshire Road

A week on….work is still continuing for the team

A week on from the last of the school visits and the team are starting to collate all the work. Marjorie has already started inputting and editing some of the writing from Kincraig school and I am looking at options of how the illustrations can be integrated into the book as a design element.
The whole team will have a formal meeting next week to assess all the entries and to start shortlisting.
There should also be another spread in the gazette next week highlighting the project.

Art - Session Two

The focused writing team still hard at work in the morning sessions, have started now to get the children to type up their stories on the laptops.
Session two of the Art continues…. We were lucky again with the weather so were able to take all our art gear outside - paints, felt-tip pens, palettes, oil pastels, coloured pencils - all in their boxes like tempting sweets, waiting to be opened and used to produce bright, colourful drawings and paintings.
What was important this time was to make sure that everyone is now working independently on their own drawings for their own stories. We need to have a story and matching illustration from every child, so that we can choose the winners who will make it into the book.

The Art team - Session One.

Spent our first Art session with the children. Interesting to see how their ideas are beginning to be explored, with all of them working straightaway on large A1 sheets of paper. They haven't completed a full story as yet, so haven't got a narrative to match to their drawings, but are extremely comfortable using paints and working on a larger scale. The children also worked in pairs, which was an interesting assignment. Art has the potential to be a solitary occupation and so seeing a collaborative process evolving was really fascinating.

Project moves to Devonshire Road School

Well, the wait is finally over! Our Project has now moved on to Devonshire Road Primary School, after the Summer break. And everyone is really excited to get back to being creative.
We have decided to split the writing team and the art team this time to give a more intensive, focused session. Marjorie and Myra introduced the project and have now spent two sessions working with the children to develop their ideas for the stories.

Gazette article for Claremont School

Some funding made available to help with our project

Gazette article for Kincraig School project

Day 4 Week 4 at Claremont

Another exciting day spent in the classroom. We had the privilege of hearing the children read their stories out from the front of the class and then to see lots of the artwork already produced. Not only are there some really great writers in the group, but there are also some really great artists!

Claremont - Day Three - Week three

We actually spent our session in the main classroom this time with the whole group (minus a couple that had gone on a trip), so this meant we had a lot more new recruits as well as the regular group. All the children had been working on this project during the week, taking ownership of it and coming up with some really great things. They had even made a display for the wall (see image below), thinking of words describing the forest, finding images around the theme and even displayed the photographs that we had taken of them hard at work. What was also exciting was the piece of writing that was displayed on the monitor and read out by one of the boys, which they had all worked on together. They had used some fabulous adjectives which helped to conjure up the imagery of the forest and Daisy's pending adventure.

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And now the next set of photographs needs to be in a separate grouping, as in the absence of Myra today, I broke photography rules and had the children 'show off' their drawings with 'big grins'- (sorry!) 

and then who could refuse getting the camera out again for this great t-shirt 

                                             and then finally to capture the classes 'toy rabbit'!

Claremont Day two - Week two

The children hadn't had much time to write up their stories from last week, so a few of them narrated theirs for us and the rest of the group. The stories contained a lot of exciting twists and turns with some vivid images springing to mind. This session we had two new pupils who were brought up to speed and very quickly started sharing their ideas and writing them down. The rest of the group started drawing, mostly examining what their characters would look like and some actually diving straight into some action scenes. A couple of children were keen to render their drawings only in pencil without any colour, which from an artist's point of view was quite interesting (especially in an age of digital technicolor). They will have some time next week to do some more work on this project and we are keen to see how their stories will become more rounded and perhaps see some more drawings or even paintings for next weeks session.

Claremont School - Day one - Week one

The project has now moved on to Claremont School.
Day one - a different school and a different group of children to introduce the project to. Ideas from the group were flowing backwards and forwards non-stop, which was fabulous (in fact one boy was bursting with ideas). They all agreed however, that they would help each other to develop the strongest stories within small groups and this way there wouldn't be too many themes, sending the narrative off-track. There are some really strong storylines coming through already which is really exciting. Kincraig school started a little slower, but gained momentum towards the end. And Claremont have definitely taken on the challenge. After all, this is a competition and only three schools have been invited to be involved and we are looking for the best stories and the best illustrations... so gauntlets on schools and pupils!

A couple of ' quick taster photos' (until Myra's beautifully framed, crisp photos arrive)

(and now for Myra's photos:)