Brixham Library With Tim Bowler

Year 7 English students share their stories with Year 1

Year 7 students visited Galmpton and White Rock Primary Schools this week.  They worked closely with year 1 students to help encourage and support their progress in reading. 

Over the last half-term year 7 have been creating their own books in their English lessons.  However these stories had to have a specific audience which was year 1 students.  This has involved detailed language analysis of reading level books; looking at grammar, vocabulary and punctuation.  They also had to explore the structure and content of the stories.  The students were then asked to apply this knowledge and to produce their own reading level books for KS1 students.  The year 7’s were very excited and committed to this project and have produced some amazing books!  At the end of the unit a competition was held to select the best books from each class and a total of 24 students were selected to visit the primary schools.  Ten students visited Galmpton and fourteen visited White Rock along with Mrs Howgate and Ms Boyce.

The whole experience was delightful; the maturity of year 7 as they worked individually with a KS1 student was exceptional and their patience, kindness and teaching skills were impressive.  The KS1 students obviously loved the experience and at Galmpton the students were so inspired with reading these books that they instantly started writing and creating their own books back in lessons!  Definitely an experience to treasure for all involved.

The books created by Year 7 are now on display in the Cube.

Churston's Carnegie Shadowing Group

English students have been hard at work preparing for their presentation for this year's trip to take part in the South Devon Carnegie Shadowing Group presentations. There were eight books short-listed this year and students from all year groups have been busy reading and reviewing them so that we can choose our favourite book before the National Winner of the Carnegie prize is announced!

Ten schools took part in the meeting from all over South Devon and the quality of the presentations was excellent. The meeting started with a talk from a well known teenager author called Keren David who talked to the students about her work and answered lots of their questions. Each school had been assigned a novel from the short-list and they then prepared and performed their own interpretation of that novel. Our students were assigned to focus on the novel 'Code Name Verity' by Elizabeth Wein which is set during World War Two. We decided to put together a book trailer and have spent the last three weeks meeting most lunchtimes to film and edit our work in time for the meeting. The students acted out different scenes for the trailer and helped with the editing process. For the presentation our students took to the stage and each said a few words about the novel before we showed the audience our trailer. The students were fantastic in their performance and a real credit to the school. Everyone enjoyed the trip and we are looking forward to next year’s Carnegie Shadowing books!