Wilberfoss Primary School

Answer – Very, very well indeed thanks very much. They absolutely loved it.

Before half term Year 5 & 6 had the great opportunity to take part n the two day “Create Comics” Workshop run by Jim Medway. Jim’s a professional artist and educator and his “Create Comics” Workshop is all about inspiring a love of reading and nurturing a visual literacy in students.

Over the two days of great fun our pupils tended to have two poses;

Pose Number 1: Rapt and listening attentively to what Jim was telling them.

Pose Number 2: heads down making great art and comics.

And they all worked incredibly hard on their art, learning so much about comics, about the best ways to present their ideas on the page and over the course of the two days we had some incredible results and everyone had a great time.

DAY 1:

Day 1 consisted of a brief introduction to comics as an artistic medium. And then it was straight into the work with the children using the ideas of clarity and simplicity in design to create characters based on themselves – all based on the master of the artform Charles Schulz:

From there it was straight on into advanced design, with everyone working on a style sheet provided by Jim, putting their simplified selves into a host of poses. The improvement in their work just across this sheet was quite marvellous to see:

Day 1 eneded with all of the children working on their 3 panel comics jam strip. The idea is simple. Start a 3 panel story, drawing just the first panel. Then pass it on and someone else gets to draw panel two. They can continue your story anyway they want. And once panel two is complete, it’s passed on again and a third person tackles panel 3. And all done to a time limit.

DAY 2:

Day 2 kicked off with with a quick introduction from Jim followed by another 3 panel jam session, this time with the children choosing their panels rather than simply progressing 1-2-3. Again, the improvement in their skills was noticeable and some really nice work was done by all.

From the 3 panel jams we were off into a world of shadow, shading, emphasis and perspective, with a very intensive and hard working session teaching the children how to pick out the essential parts of their work and highlighting it with light and dark. Plus they had a quick fire lesson on perspective and the importance of establishing the back, mid and foreground in their pictures.

And then we were into the final afternoon session of the workshop. Making Minicomics. A fantastic afternoon and an incredibly busy one. All around the hall the activity was incredible – children making, drawing, planning their minicomics. And at the end of the session we put the photocopier into overdrive to make 4 copies of all 47 minicomics. The idea is to get the pupils fired up over their work and by producing multiple copies they’re no longer just making something for themselves – 1 copy went to Jim to look at, 1 copy will be on display to the entire school in our new library and two copies go to the pupils to take home, swap with others or do what they want with them.

These are just a few of the minicomics – they’re all available for you to see in the school library.

All in all, the Create Comics workshop was a huge success. It was a lot of hard work, but seemed to fly by in a blur because everyone had so much fun working so hard.

Hopefully the pupils will have a much better understanding of comics as a medium, about the ways they can use the visual literacy they learned about during the workshop in their work, and will have much more confidence in their artistic skills.

Year 5, Year 6, Mr Bruton, Mrs Hatter, Mr Nevill and Mrs Monkman would like to thank Jim Medway for coming out to the school. We can heartily recommend his workshop for any other school – fun, engaging, remarkably educational – everyone agreed it was well worth it.

And we’d all like to thank Year 5 & Year 6 for making the two days a fantastic experience for us all. They were a credit to the school and most importantly, a credit to themselves.

Jim Medway has a website and blog which has more details. His workshop promotional material can be found here.

The library is ready, everything is in place, all of our shelving arrived, the library cards have been made, all the stock is in place.

And most importantly of all, the children are very, very, very excited to see the results. We’ll be opening the library to children (and staff) after half term. And we’re having a formal opening on World Book Day (Thursday 3rd March).

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the pupils who’ve proved absolutely invaluable in helping put the library together. They’ve unboxed, stamped, barcoded, catalogued, book-jacketed, shelved and much, much more. And all without complaint but with a magnificent sense of infectious enthusiasm.

Now I thought you’d like to see some of the pictures of the finished library:

And now a little more detail…..

THE FICTION SHELVES:

Packed with reading material, full of great authors for the children to explore.

THE SHORTER FICTION SHELVES, PLUS POETRY, FOLK TALES AND PLAYS:

Perfect reading for our developing readers, but also full of fun for everyone – because there’s always a time when we want something shorter.

THE PICTURE BOOK SECTION:

Full of some truly beautiful picture books.

THE FUN NON-FICTION AND NEW NON-FICTION SHELVES:

Somewhere to highlight all of the new non-fiction we have, but also somewhere to put all that difficult to categorise non-fiction that makes up series like Dead Famous, The Knowledge and more.

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL SHELVES:

Comics are a great way of expanding children’s reading. And at Wilberfoss we’re proud to have the best Graphic Novel library we know of in any school. Full of old favourites like Raymond Briggs, Tintin and Asterix and packed with new titles for the children to explore. They’ve a wonderful world of comics and graphic novels waiting for them.

But this isn’t the end of the library’s development. Far from it. We believe that the library should really be “the heart of the school”, providing the children with a love of reading that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

We’ll be continually improving our library, making it somewhere truly special, involving the children every step of the way. We hope you’ll join in with the enthusiasm that everyone in school feels for the library and we’d like to invite you, the parents and carers of our pupils, to come and visit us in the library at any time.

Well, the library work continues. The non fiction is finished – it’s all been book jacketed (the plastic protective covers you see in libraries to protect the books, it’s all been catalogued onto our new computerised system (more on that some other time), it’s sorted, shelved and displayed properly. It’s quite amazing how many children have been finding lots of exciting non-fiction they’d never seen before, just thanks to this redesign.

Heavens knows how excited they’ll be by some of the brand new non fiction we’ve got in!

Right now we’re just waiting for a few more things – crucially one set of shelving and some very important book jackets – who’d have thought that an educational supplier (one of the main ones) would have run out of book jackets to fit standard size paperbacks?

So we’ve got nearly all of our new stocks ready to go. We’ll be shelving next week and then have to wait for the final shelves to come. (Yes, it’s very frustrating).

However, in the meantime, we’ve kept busy doing a spot of shelf labelling and wall displays for the library. And we though you may want to see a few pictures of those….

The school library should be the absolute heart of the school. And although ours may be small, it’s in a great position – acting as a major throughfare to KS1, KS2, the ICT suite, the hall and reception. So we want to make it as attractive and stimulating as possible to the children. Expect the displays to change regularly.

The non-fiction has been completely reorganised into subjects the children recognise and understand. The Dewey Ststem we used to use is a magnificent thing, but if the children don’t use it, it’s useless and doesn’t help us at all. We’d rather have a simpler system which the children will use than a classic, brilliant system they do not. Apologies to Mr Dewey. Anyway, this is the wall display that breaks it all down for the children:

Next, a small section of the Fiction shelves – notice the big gap in the middle and the spaces at the top of each shelf set – that’s where the shelves we’re waiting for are going. We’ll be putting our lovely picture books in the dump-bin unit and the shorter fiction on the shelf to right of the dump-bin.

And we intend to make the library as bright and as fun as possible, so the posters and displays will be changing regularly:

On the other side of the library we’ll have our Graphic Novel Shelves and somewhere to highlight some of the new Non-Fiction and the sets of fun Non-Fition we’ve got in now (Horrible Histories, Dead Famous etc).

We’ve received all of our new prose fiction books now. A small army of pupils have been helping out with cataloguing, bar-coding and fitting into protective book jackets and they’re ready to be shelved.

We decided that the best way of getting the pupils excited about the new library stock was to give them a say in what was going to be on the shelves. In late 2010, Mrs Hatter coordinated a survey to find out exactly what sort of books the pupils wanted. Here are just some of the ones we’ve received:

Later this half term Year 5 & 6 will have the fantastic opportunity to take part in a two day “Create Comics” workshop with professional comic artist and educator Jim Medway. This all ties into our ongoing project to rejuvenate and improve the school library, fostering a love of reading in the pupils that will last them a lifetime.

The Create Comics workshop will introduce our children to the idea of comics as an artistic medium. It’s certainly not all about superheroes or The Beano. The medium can include as much diversity and talent as prose and at it’s best, creates something impossible to reproduce – a perfect synthesis of ideas, words and pictures. There are comics for everyone, no matter how young or old.

Jim Medway is an artist working in comics and education for several years. His Create Comics workshop is all about inspiring a love of reading and nurturing a visual literacy in students. And this visual literacy can be used in so many ways – design, architecture, fashion, film-making and much more.

Just some of the benefits:
LITERACY – The combination of words and pictures can spark interest in even the most unmotivated, frustrated or reluctant reader.
ART SKILLS – Raise children’s artistic abilities, purposefully creating narratives to hold the attention of an audience.
CONFIDENCE – Initial exercises ‘ease’ participants into sharing their work without putting anyone ‘on the spot’.
COMMUNICATION skills are encouraged through working together and collaborating towards common ends. Comics can allow their creators to ‘find their voice’.

The sessions, over two days, will include clear and simple exercises to inspire children, no matter what their reading or artistic abilities, to produce stories of their own. With an emphasis on communication, simplicity and clarity rather than drawing skills, they will learn basics of storytelling, character design, ways to use speech and thought along with basic drawing skills and how to make their work look impressively designed. The sessions will conclude with the class working together to produce their own self-published comic or magazine. At the end of each project, finished work is collated into a homemade ‘minicomic’, giving participants the pride of being ‘in print’.

For more details, please feel free to ask at school – Mr Bruton will be more than happy to explain.

Jim Medway has a website and blog which has more details. His workshop promotional material can be found here.