On Wednesday the 16th of June Bella B, Cooper R and myself attended a children’s writing workshop at Port Chalmers School. This was run by a famous New Zealand author, Heather McQuillan. She taught us how to ‘trap a tiny tale and tame it’. We practised pointing to different objects in the classroom and naming them correctly, for example curtain. We then pointed to the same objects again but were encouraged to identify them as something else, for example pointing at the curtains and saying “pig”. We made a long list of all the nouns we used. We chose one of those nouns and that became the subject of our story. My story was about a school bag. We had to add an adjective to the noun to make it more interesting so mine became a bright blue school bag. In our short story we had to transform into the object we chose. I had to become a bright blue school bag. It was fun writing this short story because it made me use my imagination and write something I wouldn’t normally write about. I learnt that when I write stories not to end it with “I woke up and it was all a dream” or “everyone died”, to be more efficient and unique.


Hugo Beeby
Room 1