My First School Visit!

Yesterday, Monday 18th July 2022, I did my first school visit–and it was with Christow Community Primary School.

The day started early as I got a lift in with my partner who teaches there (huge thanks to him for setting up my visit!) and I met all the staff, who are lovely. I also had a fancy visitor’s lanyard to wear. The school’s a small village school, and in the morning a Year 5 and a Year 6 girl gave me a brilliant tour of the school. It was so much fun seeing my books in the class library. And my name was on the board too as I was running a creative writing workshop for Years 3 to 6 after school!

I spent the day itself in the preschool building, tucked away in an office, which was ideal for doing my work! I prefer to have no WiFi connection when I’m sitting down to work (I can’t procrastinate then!), and this turned out to be ideal here as I got so much work done.

I started with finalising the workshop plan I’d already made, namely creating a worksheet that the students could take home with them to continue the storytelling they’d start after school with me. I also planned out some fun writing games to get creativity flowing. And then it was onto my own writing! I’m deep in revisions for The Threat of the Hunt at the moment, as this book releases soon, and I managed to revise the first seven chapters, which I was really happy with.

I’m also currently working on edits for Being Ace, the ace-spec anthology that publishes with Page Street next year. I’m currently working on the developmental editors with one of Page Street’s amazing editors, and we’re tackling the stories in batching, so I made some more dev-edit notes on the third batch.

During breaktime and lunchtime, I was invited to the staff room, and I met more of the lovely school staff. And whenever I was walking back to the preschool building, I kept seeing the Year 5 who’d shown me around and she took every opportunity to ask me more questions. Her excitement at meeting a real author was tangible–and it made me so, so happy. She asked me some great stuff (she was also delighted to find out I have some Shetland ponies) and she told me all about the book she’s currently working on, which sounded amazing. But a question I was not prepared for was, “Have you got any allergies?” When I told her I did, her face lit up. “We’ve got so much in common,” she said.

As the afternoon progressed, I found myself getting a little nervous about running the workshop. I’ve not taught young children before, and I’d only had experience with teaching adults. But when it was time, I threw myself straight into it, and it was wonderful! (It was also very hot due to the heatwave the UK currently has–nearly 30 degrees C, inside a hot school with no air conditioning!)

We started off playing a word-association game that then turned into a creative-description game. After that, we did group storytelling where I wrote a first sentence of a story on the whiteboard and they each wrote a second sentence on a piece of paper before passing the paper to their left and adding another sentence. We circulated the papers around several times, and then read the stories and voted for which one we thought was the funniest and which the most creative.

I was so impressed with the quality of their writing, and it was wonderful how engaged every student there was. Every time I asked for a volunteer, I had multiple hands shoot up, and one time when I asked who would like to read out their writing, every single student wanted to!

I then did a workshop on character creation (it was so lovely when I asked who their favourite characters were and the Year 6 who showed me around said Seven from my Untamed series!), and we used my worksheets to create characters. Many of the students were developing characters in stories they’d already started writing!

The second part of my workshop was on plot creation and structure. As the students had filled out their characters’ goals and already thought about what would stop them, we then shaped these into three-act plots, and I talked through some of the typical plot components, before I opened the floor for questions.

And, finally, we finished with a book signing, which was so much fun as I signed and personalised copies of Untamed, Fragmented, and The Curse of the Winged Wight for the children, all the while answering more questions–such as whether I plan, who creates book covers, how I get more copies of my books, and why I love writing dark stories.

All in all, it was a fantastic day!