NZ Children's Book Awards and Writers Workshop

This week 21 enthusiastic

writers attended the NZ

Children’s Book Awards which featured a selection of the finalists at St Margarets

College. We heard 3 writers

speak: Kirsten Slade writer of
The Mapmakers Race,

Sarah Pepperle writer of

Art-tastic and James T Guthrie

writer of Bulls Eye Bella. 

After the Book Awards session author James T Guthrie came back to St Albans to run

a writing session with our group of writers. The children had an awesome afternoon

learning more about the process of writing and of writing a book.  The activity they did was called the Writers Dice where the children created a table of words that had to be included in their story. This was challenging and created some very funny stories! Once the children had finished writing they joined James in presenting their creative writing to the group.

Some of the key learning to be an awesome writer was to persevere, to show not tell,
to edit, edit(rework/re-craft) and edit some more. It was very cool to work alongside a published

writer!