On Wednesday, 20th March, writer Noel Fagan held a special assembly for students at the Lancasterian. After running the workshops with pupils as part of his MA Creative Writing course, Noel enjoyed the experience so much that he returned to work in the school.
Noel worked with students from various classes, producing two different stories: Iggiley Piggiley and Our Manchester Journey. Both stories made it into the All Write! anthology as examples of excellent writing, and so the Lancasterian held their very own celebration event to reward the children’s efforts.
Since 2005, Manchester Metropolitan University has published the creative writing of more than 600 young writers. The All Write! competition is open to 8-12 year olds this year (click herefor more information) and entries are already flooding in from all over the world.
Having had the privilege of editing this year’s anthology, myself, and organiser Kaye Tew, were invited along to give out the anthologies and to congratulate the students on their success.
Noel began by reading the students their stories and asked his main storyteller, William, to come up and act out a few of the parts of the story for the rest of the audience. William did this very well and all the children cheered and laughed along as Noel read out the stories to them.
Iggiley Piggileyinvolved an amazing trip to another world, where all of the pupils found strange and mysterious things, such as an ocean made of chocolate and aliens with weapons that fired mashed potato! Noel also showed the crowd the weird and wonderful pictures that the children had created, including a funky, which is a mix between a fox and a monkey (my personal favourite).
My Manchester Journey was based around the idea of time travel and students used words and pictures to put together a very exciting story about giant dinosaurs and a yellow submarine!
After the storytelling, Kaye congratulated all the students on their hard work and the prize giving began. All the students involved received a copy of the All Write! anthology to take home and a big round of applause from their teachers and fellow pupils. As they then gave Noel a round of applause,
one of the pupils asked if he would come back and work with them again. He very happily agreed.
Many students in the Humanities Faculty get the chance to work on projects in schools. If you are studying a Humanities degree at MMU and would like to get involved, emailhlssschools@mmu.ac.uk The next round of training for HLSS will not begin until this coming September, but there are always opportunities to support schools’ visits in different faculties within MMU.
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