Making writing fun - more Islington schools come on board with the Writers in Schools project
The ‘Writers in Schools’ project, funded by the Cripplegate Foundation and
supported by CEA@Islington, is expanding. Since it started in January 2003,
over 1,100 children in 17 schools across the borough have been participating
in 33 projects with a variety of end products. These include 28 page printed
booklets, 8 page newsletters, compilations of children’s work and drama
performances for parents. As a Year 3 child said about a Black History project
at Clerkenwell Parochial: ‘It made writing fun’.
This term there are a further four schools taking part in the project: Hugh
Myddelton Primary School is doing the ‘Big fish, little fish’ transition to
secondary school project; William Tyndale Primary School is doing a play about
time travel; Prior Weston Primary School is doing a play about Victorian
children and Robert Blair Primary School is doing a play about advertising.
All the plays are written by the children themselves with the help of a
professional writer and their teachers.
To find out more about the exciting projects lined up for this term, please
see details below or contact Pat Farrington, Writers in Schools Project
Manager on 020 7272 6684.
You are invited to send a journalist or photographer to the events at Robert
Blair, Prior Weston and William Tyndale primary schools.
Robert Blair Primary School
is working with playwright/screenwriter,
Andy Walsh, in the first residency in a school in north Islington on a play
with the theme of ‘persuaders’ set in an advertising agency called Flogalot
who pride themselves on being able to sell snow to the Eskimos and fleas to a
dog. In this play, called ‘All You Want’, the children from Year 5 have
written sketches showing how a newly-invented product, Chinese chocolate
crisps, can be easily sold to gullible customers, the effects of ‘pester
power’ and cheap gold rings that go green on your finger and you can’t get
them off… A look behind the scenes at the wiles of advertisers to make us part
with our money. The children will perform their play to parents and others on
Friday 27 May at 2.45 pm.
Hugh Myddelton Primary School
is working with children’s writer, Neil
Arksey, for the third year running on the ‘Big fish, little fish’ project with
Year 6 children. Building on last year’s residency there, the pupils are
exploring children’s hopes, fears and expectations about secondary school
through drama and writing, and also offering practical strategies to help
children make the most of their new school, in areas such as making new
friends and conflict resolution. They plan to have rehearsed readings of their
stories or drama sketches at the school on Wednesday 22 June. This session is
only open to parents.
Prior Weston Primary School
is working with award-winning playwright,
Diane Samuels, on a play about Victorian children with Year 5s, focusing on
the lives of poor children and how many of them had to earn their own living,
such as the 8-year-old watercress seller from the survey in 1851-2 by Henry
Mayhew who worked 12 hours a day and told him: ‘I ain’t a child.’ Again, this
project is at an early stage, but the children were intrigued by a
presentation from the London Metropolitan Archives which contrasted past and
present images of the Artful Dodger’s route with Oliver Twist from The Angel,
down St. John’s Road, through Exmouth Street to Saffron Hill at the bottom of
which lived Fagin (which we discovered in an engraving from the 1830s was
based on ‘Fagan’s’, a real place in Field Lane, where silk handkerchiefs were
hung out to dry after being pick pocketed. The children will write a play
based on their research on Victorian children to be performed on Friday 1 July
at 2.30 pm.
William Tyndale Primary School
is working with playwright/screenwriter,
Andy Walsh, for the third year running in this school. Year 4 children will be
doing a play, performing to parents and others on Wednesday 13 July at 2.30
pm. This residency has not started yet, so plans are at an early stage, but
include exciting ideas such as using video sequences and images as the
background to a play about time travel. The underlying theme is ‘working
together cooperatively’ which will be shown through a story where a group of
children who, when failing to work together, are sucked into a computer and
scattered across the internet. These websites take them to different times and
places and provide both challenges and moral choices. The children find they
can only succeed if they work together.
For more information, please contact CEA@Islington's Communications Department: