Swindon Youth Festival of Literature
The first visit to students who were from year 7 and 8 was on the Monday. An event along with the other 11 Swindon secondary schools taking part in the SYFL at the Wyvern Theatre to see the author Matt Oldfield perform. Matt spoke to students about how he became a writer alongside his brother, and his love of football. He spent a lot of the time in the audience with the students asking or answering questions.
On the Tuesday we welcomed Author Gareth P Jones who visted us to hold a workshop with Year 5 Primary Schools, Haydonleigh, Moredon and Greenmeadow. He played the ukulele, keyboards, guitar and got the Primary Schools to sing along with him. Gareth talked about his books and his journey to become an author. The primary school children thoroughly enjoyed listening and interacting with Gareth. One school requested an invite to return next year for the festival!
On the Wednesday author Helen Dennis visited Nova for the day. Helen spent P1 talking to the whole of year 7 about how she became a writer from an early age and how long it took her to get a book published. She then spent the rest of the day with individual groups doing workshops with them on code cracking. In these she got them thinking about images we see and how different people see different things. Helen got the students thinking about if they could fix their age what would it be and why. She got them to do some mind mapping to come up with ideas for a story.
On Thursday the poet Ash Dickinson visited Nova to do a workshop with the whole of year 7. Ash started with a short presentation which included some of his poems. He gave the students ideas to create their own Haikus. He went around the students helping them and then got them to share their poems with everyone. Students really enjoyed this session with a lot of creativity in the poems that they wrote.
On Friday 6 students from Years 7, 8 and 9 attended a book quiz at Ridgeway school with the other 11 Swindon secondary schools who take part in SYFL. The author and Patron of Reading, Joffre White was the quiz master for this event with 12 rounds of different topics relating to reading which students had to answer working as a team.
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