School Visits
My school visits are the perfect place to learn and explore your creative side. As, children's book writer and illustrator, I specialize in running creative writing workshops and illustration workshops for both children and adults. My goal is to help foster creativity and confidence in my students while teaching them the fundamentals of writing and art. I'm also a former teacher with 10 years experience in the classroom across every year group. I also offer school's a CPD session that explores how we can support creative writing across the school.
My workshops are designed to be fun and engaging, as well as informative and inspiring. Through these workshops, I hope to help my students discover the joy of creating something unique.
School visits usually involve some sort of assembly where I talk about my style and inspiration and tell some stories.
I can then provide a variety of different workshops depending on the need or requirements however a typical day might look like this:
I would typically visit your school for a day and during that day do four sessions.
Reception for 50 minutes
KS1 for 60 minutes
LKS2 for 60 minutes
UKS2 for 60 minutes
The younger children get a mixture of storytelling, poems and joining which normally involves a story about a duck called Kevin.
Towards the end, I bring out my books and show them the sort of thing I write and draw. The Imagination Thief involved lots of weird and wonderful imaginary friends so I get the children to create an imaginary friend - what would it look like? What would its special features be? This normally results in some bizarre creativity and fun.
The older children get a mixture of stories and talk about writing and coming up with ideas. We look at how my books took normal everyday stuff and ideas and 'changed the angle' to create a story. For example, I talk about how my first book was inspired by thinking about imaginary friends and how we grow out of them but...what if we don't - what if they were being kidnapped!
My fee for a day varies according to where you are in the world but I think my rates are fairly standard.
As well as assembly-style sessions, I am also very experienced at providing writing workshops and longer-term projects. I am particularly good at helping children develop their ideas.
I am often booked as part of World Book Week. I have been known to open libraries and unveil murals. But generally I seem to get booked in as a boost to a school's creativity and morale.
