Libraries all over the country have been supporting children’s reading over the long holiday with the Summer Reading Challenge. This is really important work. There is overwhelming evidence that reading for pleasure is good for you in all kinds of ways, from improving your SAT scores to much more important stuff like helping you understand and communicate with your family, friends, classmates …
Every year the Summer Reading Challenge curates booklists to help children enjoy reading, and libraries organize events to support the programme. This year the theme was Marvellous Makers and Morpeth Library booked me to do a workshop on storymaking and storytelling for children aged 6-12.
There are many ways to make a story, and we had two whole hours, so we tried lots of them. Together we used our bodies to make settings, we thought about our main character by drawing them, and we sent them on a journey to get what they really, really wanted.
Then we thought about how we might share our stories with each other, and did that. Time flew! We heard such a range of stories: from a hedgehog who wanted to win a cooking competition to a time-traveller who wanted to save his Dad. Some stories were cute, some scary, some fantastical, some funny; all of them came from the heart and the imagination. So much to enjoy!
