On 16 November 2022, teachers, librarians, literacy leaders from the 29 primary schools taking part in Readers to Writers 2023 spent the day sharing ideas on how to really let the project fly in school.

The only conference of its kind in Shropshire for primary school teachers with a panel of nationally renowned speakers, the day focussed on:

• Inspiring, informing and empowering teaching staff, to develop their own creative writing teaching practice.

• How to immerse yourself and your pupils in Readers to Writers 2023.

• Working as a community and to share ideas and experiences.

“It has given us an inspiring day into the minds of authors and illustrators.  We have re-found our enthusiasm for teaching creativity.”

“I want to go home and try everything right away!  Loads of practical ideas ways to structure writing in class etc.“

“The speakers were full of enthusiasm and it fuels your own enthusiasm for the project.“

“The workshops were all A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.  Real credit to Martin, Adam and Nicola.  They were funny, engaging and inspiring.”

“A very informative and inspiring day where it was so lovely to think about the importance and benefit of creativity.”

“I’m buzzing with ideas for the Spring Term and can’t wait to start.”

MARTIN BROWN: There’s a reason the word imagination and the word image come from the same root. When someone imagines something, more often than not, it involves forming a picture in the mind. From the simplest daydream to the rules of Quidditch to Anna Karenina’s terrible confrontation with steel and steam, creating a story usually starts with seeing the story.  In Martin’s workshops he talked about how the distinction between text and image is an artificial one and how images can be used to write stories, not just illustrate them. He shared how illustrators ‘author’ their pictures – or rather, how everybody does. How imagery alone has been used as the storyteller for centuries. How today some narrative books have no text all. And how editorial cartoons use imagery as a way to avoid spelling out those thousand long-winded words.  Then he guided teachers in investigating how kids use pictures to tell stories and how they might use the pictures in their heads to write a narrative in sentences and how to use those pictures in their heads as illustrations for those written narratives.

Patron of Shropshire Bookfest, Martin Brown is probably best known for being the illustrator of the phenomenally successful Horrible Histories series – still going after nearly 30 years, it has sold over 30 million copies. Along the way, it’s been adapted into both award-winning stage and TV shows – and recently, Horrible Histories, The Movie.  Martin has also written and illustrated Lesser Spotted Animals and Lesser Spotted Animals 2 – fun non-fiction books about some of the world’s more unfamiliar wildlife – the brilliant beasts you never know you needed to know about.  Martin’s long-awaited foray into fiction, Nell and the Cave Bear, came out in 2021 with the second book in the series due in March 2023.  A great believer in ‘drawing is for everyone’, Martin inspires everyone to pick up a pencil and have a go.

NICOLA DAVIES:  Exams and tests are all about coming up with the right answer, but when working creatively the idea is to come up with something new, which of course means there just isn’t a right answer. To be creative we must be prepared to experiment and to play, and never to label anything as a failure. Things that don’t work are just the route to finding things that do.

In Nicola’s workshop, delegates took part in tasks that encouraged a playful approach to words. They were asked to put ideas of right and wrong, of good grammar and good sense, to one side. No-one could say what the ‘outcomes’ of this were going to be, because that’s another feature of creative work, its results are, and should be, entirely unpredictable; poems were written, collaborations made with a neighbour and shared pieces that celebrated the value of play, invention and pleasure – key components of any creative endeavour – were produced.

Nicola Davies is the author of more than 80 books for children, picture books, fiction, non fiction and poetry, many of which have been published in more than 12 different languages. Her work focusses on the natural world and our relationship to it, but she has also written about child refugees (‘The Day War Came’, ‘King of the Sky’), disability, (Perfect) grief (The Pond), and children’s right (Every Child A Song). Her work has won awards around the world and she was the first recipient of the SLA’s award for Outstanding Contribution to Children’s Non Fiction.

 Her recent work includes a collection of poems about the environmental crisis created in collaboration for Hay Festival, with climate scientist Prof Ed Hawkins, an operatic production of her book The Promise and a forthcoming collection of poems about the refugee experience, to raise funds for the charity Choose Love. An animated film of her book The Promise was broadcast worldwide by the BBC in 2020. Her most recent book ‘The Song That Sings Us’ a novel for older children and adults was published by Firefly in October 2021 and reviewed by The Guardian as “Storytelling at the most poetic scale, strange, bloody, grand and unforgettable.”

ADAM GUILLAIN: What makes a great story? How can we inspire our pupils to write them? What knowledge needs to be in place for writing stories to go well as a whole-class learning activity? In this session, Adam got the whole room moving about, collaborating on a shared story and offered a wealth of ideas, top tips, prompts and practical activities that teachers were thrilled that they could use in classrooms across all the age ranges.

Adam started his teaching career working in primary schools in London before travelling to Tanzania to work on a teacher training programme with Voluntary Services Overseas. There he met his wife, Charlotte – they eventually moved to Oxford and started writing, while Adam continued to teach in Early Years and Charlotte worked as an editor for Pearson. Adam’s first novel, Bella Balistica and the Temple of Tikal was published in 2001 and since then Adam has gone on to write over 200 books for children. Adam is a former writer-in-residence at The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, a co-founder of Storytelling Schools and is currently working on an exciting new app to support parents and their children prepare for pre-school settings.