There’s a particular kind of noise a room makes when a few hundred kids are all dancing the same dance at the same time, and Sydney Town Hall had it in spades during this year’s Sydney Writers Festival excursion.
Students arrived expecting to sit and listen. They left having danced a giant soccer routine led by children’s author Mick Elliot, an activity that turned a formal author talk into something closer to a party, with kids shouting the moves back at him as they went. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with a nine-year-old far longer than a lecture on narrative structure ever would.
Then came the quieter moment. Dav Pilkey, whose books have made reluctant readers into avid ones for two decades, talked about being a kid who didn’t fit the mould at school and turned that into a career telling stories other kids couldn’t put down.
He didn’t dress it up. He talked about his own childhood plainly, and told the room to go after whatever they were curious about, whether or not it looked like anyone expected it to.
By the end of the day, the students weren’t just talking about the authors they’d met. They were talking about writing their own stories, which is probably the best measure of whether a festival like this actually worked.
Back at school, that same spark showed up in the youngest classes when the K-2 students joined National Simultaneous Storytime, reading Luna Roo the Kangaroo Baller alongside children right across the country.
And in the science room, older students spent the term elbow-deep in experiments on states of matter, forces and the natural world, the kind of learning that comes from testing an idea rather than being told the answer.
