Authors to light the fire of inspiration in Shropshire primary school pupils

Children’s authors are set to share information and ideas on how to really inspire children to write brilliant stories.

From Monday 11 March to Friday 15 March there will be a team of Bookfest volunteers zipping up and down, backwards and forwards across the county bringing authors into primary schools across Shropshire for a series of very special workshops and with a very exciting purpose in mind.

Why? Because over 1600 pupils will be working closely with these authors and experts in the field of creative writing so that each pupil is inspired to produce and write their very own book. These books will be entered into a county-wide competition being run by Shrewsbury Bookfest.

This project, delivered by Shrewsbury Bookfest, called ‘Schools’ Week’ started in 2018. When Shrewsbury Bookfest began developing the project, it made sense to seek to equip teachers with new, original, proven skills to use to help their own pupils along the path towards writing their own book. So the 29 primary schools who signed up to the project were able to send their teachers to a Creative Writing Conference put on by Shrewsbury Bookfest at the University Centre Shrewsbury in November. Here nearly 100 teachers had the opportunity to work with specialists in the area of creative writing pedagogy and to share knowledge and expertise to take back to their own classrooms.

The next stage of the project happens this week where 9 carefully selected children’s authors will be visiting the pupils involved Schools’ Week for in-depth, in-school workshops to help them create their very own book. Every school has been given copies of the books written by their visiting author so the pupils can get a flavour of the style and genre of their visiting author and discuss how and why the author reached the exalted status of a published author.

Shrewsbury Bookfest has also given every pupil a blank book – because as well as producing their own story, pupils will be encouraged to research the mechanics of a book such as how and why a book displays a bar code, a publisher name, the use of indexes etc. so they can make their book look like any regular title found on the shelf of any library or bookshop.