English Creative Writing Experience with Tess Woods
During Term 1, our Years 11 and 12 ATAR English students were delighted to attend a creative workshop conducted by Tess Woods, a well-known Perth author.
Tess has had two commercial fiction books published in the past two years, both Australian best-sellers and her third book is due for publication in June 2019. She also won Book of the Year by AusRom Today and has been nominated for this year’s Stella Prize.
Having such a successful, enthusiastic author present her ’10 Steps to a Great Story’ was an exciting experience for our students. As the title suggests, it is a 10 step process to help students navigate the uncertain world of creative writing in practical terms, using the dystopian novel, The Hunger Games and the Australian classic Coonardoo, to show them specific examples.
Being very familiar with the dystopian novel, our students enthusiastically participated in all of Tess’s activities and they enjoyed interacting with each other in order to test their newfound skills.
As students find creative writing somewhat challenging, the wealth of information, strategies and ideas presented by Tess certainly made them all feel more confident when next presented with such a task.
Kevin Price presents Born Storytellers to English students
Wow! Fantastic! What a great day! They were only several of the comments from Years 11 & 12 English students when renowned educator, writer and motivator, Kevin Price presented a full day creative writing workshop to our senior students.
The course proved very popular and effective for inspiring our students to write, and grounding them in some highly effective skills they could work on to be exam ready when the time comes. The day was highly intensive, but students and teachers were left with a set of tools to access and deal with writing ideas quickly and effectively under exam conditions.
The material presented by Kevin was designed to address specific areas of weakness identified by the 2016 ATAR exam markers as well as concerns recognised by ATAR English teachers.
Students enjoyed and participated in Kevin’s lecture, practise writing, building their self confidence in their own writing techniques and role playing.
We were indeed very fortunate to have such a talented educator sharing his skills and knowledge with our staff and students.
Mrs Jennifer Kingston-Gregory
Head of English
Pictured: Kevin Price with the Year 12 students