Thursday 21 October 2010

Children's Storytellings in Schools and Libraries


Yesterday I did a day of storytellings for Sheffield's Off The Shelf festival. Some years I do public events for them, but this time we invited school groups into the libraries.


We decided on a dinosaur theme, so I read from Gnash, Gnaw, Dinosaur! and the sequel: Rumble, Roar, Dinosaur! Trouble is, there are 14 dinosaur poems in all: too many to do in one go, so I numbered them and got the kids to choose poems by pulling the numbers out of a bag. They thought this was great fun and it meant I could stop when I thought we needed to move on.


I was in Upperthorpe Library in the morning. The invited school had let us down, but luckily St Mary's CE Primary stepped in at the last minute, which was doubly good, because they were great.

The library is part of a leisure centre, with a lovely cafe, so Sam, the brand new Children's Librarian, took me for a very tasty lunch (salmon and soft cheese panini: yum) and, while chatting, we discovered we are neighbours!


After the posh nosh, I was whizzed across town in a cab for an afternoon at Manor Library, where I met the smashing Y1 children from Prince Edward Primary. The photo above is me asking them 'Who likes drawing?'

The teachers and the librarians at both events were all really nice to me, so I had a fun day. Big thanks to the Literacy Coordinator at Prince Edwards, who decided on the spot to buy a copy of every book I had!

1 comment:

Helen said...

Looks like such a fun day! :o)