Last October I was invited to speak at the launch of the Reading Champions initiative at the Nottingham Forest ground. Reading Champions was established by the Literacy Trust to encourage more boys to read. Ideas include using role models such as sports personalities to show what a cool thing reading is (for those who don’t already know!). The initiative is full of great ideas such as ‘Extreme Reading’ events, special assemblies where teachers, schools staff, parents and invited guests talk about their favourite books etc. It’s all good stuff.
Anyway, I gave my talk at the launch and offered the teachers in the audience an unpublished short story I’d written. The story, Go, Jordan, Go, is about a boy who doesn’t have a ‘thing’ when he scores a goal. The rest of his team do – they either zoom like an aeroplane or perform a cartwheel but Jordan doesn’t. He simply runs back to the centre spot to start again. ‘Use it in any way you like,’ I told them, ‘get the children to make it into a ‘proper’ book with a cover, illustrations, blurb etc or perhaps they could act it out/ make it into a film…
Two schools so far have taken me up on this offer. The first, Heathfield Primary & Nursery in Basford, invited me in to work with the Year 6 class. They wanted to present Go Jordan Go as a comic strip. Quite a challenge! Boy, what a busy time we had. My photocopied story was chopped up, glued down, chopped up again. Names were changed. Pictures were downloaded. There were debates about the cover; frustrated faces when printers wouldn’t work. It was noisy. It was terrific.
A few weeks later the class teacher, Mrs McQueen, sent me copies of the comics. I have them on my desk in front of me now. The class clearly put a lot of effort into the project. The illustrations are delightful, showing the kids have understood the text but it was the extra details I liked the most, such as the mini biographies on the back covers. Best of all there’s a sense that everyone enjoyed the project. Result!
The second school, Whitemoor Primary and Nursery used Go Jordan Go differently. Each year group participated this time and came up with their own way of presenting the story. I was then invited to take a whole school assembly to present prizes. How proud the winners looked when I held out their work to show the rest of the school. Quite right too. Wide and wonderful were the variations. There were pop-up books containing footballs and goalposts that sprang out at you when you opened the page, some incredibly sophisticated drawings and one class had acted out the story and used the digital images to make a photo-strip. Outstanding, guys!
This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Enthusing kids? Making reading and writing a fun thing to do?
My thanks go to Heathfield and Whitmoor schools, not only for taking me up on my offer but in the wholehearted way they embraced it. I bet both schools produce the most reading Champions in Nottingham before the year’s out!
More information about Reading Champions can be found at www.readingchampions.org.uk