By the time my children arrived at school, rumours of the abduction were
spreading like wildfire across the playground. Confirmation came with the
headmistress' announcement at morning assembly. Angela Lindo, a popular
classroom assistant at the school, had disappeared. My daughters have
described the excitement that followed this terrible revelation. Thankfully
Angela had not disappeared without trace...
There was a pool of sinister green gunge in the corner of the playground. An
office had been ransacked, very carefully. In fact the school was littered
with potential clues as to who or what had kidnapped lovely Angela. It would
take a day, yes a whole school day, to address the investigation. The normal
timetable would have to be suspended because of the emergency. In Reception
and Year 1, WANTED posters were painted, while in Year 3, magnifying glasses
were distributed to begin a forensic examination of the emerging evidence.
Newspapers were compiled featuring interviews given by potential witnesses and
conspiracy theorists, of which there were many. By mid-morning break it was
clear that Angela Lindo had been abducted by an alien spacecraft. But why?
Stranger still, the bizarre events at Reay Primary School in Oval, South
London, that July morning last year mirrored similar disruptions at other
primary schools over the past couple of years. UFO crash landings, trees
sprouting alphabet leaves, school dinners cooked in word shapes, epic
stories discovered chalked across playgrounds and, in one Battersea primary
school, the arrival of a horse, a real horse, in the middle of double
literacy. What was happening in these schools?
About three years ago I invited a friend of mine, Chris Meade, down to my
daughters' primary school in South London. Chris was head of the charity
Booktrust at that time, and I wanted to show him an empty room in the
school. I had an idea that it would be good to get a playwright or a poet or
a novelist to come and write in the room. I was imagining an exchange
whereby the writer would get to leave his or her usual writing environment
and in return the school would get to have a real, breathing writer living
and working in its community. No money would have to be involved. My hope
was that the children would be able to see the writer at work, witness the
writing process taking place and think about writing for pleasure.
Like a lot of parents, I'd been surprised and saddened by the lack of time
teachers were able to spend engaging young pupils in learning through
creative play. The notorious burden of testing and assessing children seems
to have impacted directly on less “goal-driven” learning.
Every writer and improviser and painter and composer knows that failure is of
crucial importance to a project's success. Writing a play involves sitting
in front of a screen only once you've spent hours wandering hopelessly round
a room fiddling with things. The space and time and freedom required to fail
and succeed in creating something unexpected is hard to timetable. Luckily,
my daughters' headmistress agreed.
That day in the empty classroom, Chris described a new initiative called
Everybody Writes - a web-based resource that would encourage teachers to get
kids out of the classroom, thinking and writing creatively. The aim of this
week's Everybody Writes Day is to take that a step further, ignore the
curriculum for a day, and get everybody writing by whatever means necessary.
It is supposed to be a day, or half a day or an hour in the day where
writing becomes an adventure. It is not a day when correct spelling,
beautiful handwriting and perfect punctuation are priorities.
Over the past three years I have been piloting the idea with groups of primary
school teachers. My experience as an actor and in leading acting workshops
lies in teaching “devising processes”, that is, the ways in which theatre
can be made and written through games and improvisation. I structured a
workshop in which we would illustrate the boundless possibilities of an
Everybody Writes day.
The workshops with teachers were intriguing. Primary school teachers don't
leap straight into writing brilliant poems and stories. They need plenty of
time to warm up, to be sceptical, to muck about. In fact they are just like
actors, journalists and writers - and probably all of us, when we are
invited to suspend our roles as responsible, hard-working citizens and play.
It takes a little time to remember what that used to be like...
There are hundreds of writing games and stimulating writing projects that
teachers can copy and adapt for their classes. Writing is a sensual
experience. The pleasure of a thick marker pen swirling noiselessly across a
whiteboard. The awkward scratch of blunt pencil on card and, an old
favourite, the shriek of chalk on slate. We encouraged the teachers to
explore the potential satisfactions of writing with honey dripped on
polystyrene as well as imagining what story would suit such a process.
Then there is the pleasure of misspelling and gobbledegook. It requires an
excellent speller to really know that he or she has misspelt something
correctly. Late last year, my daughter explained that, during another
creative writing exercise, the pupils had renamed everything in the school
with “better” words. There was now a sign on the principal's office that
read “Headmonster”.
Of course, not every school can cope with alien abduction, King Kong
footprints across the football pitch or the production of a school
encyclopedia. But most schools can do something to prioritise chronicling,
doodling, musing, notating, corresponding, signing, coding and rhyming for a
day.
My daughter, Madeleine, tells me that when they finally located Angela, she
was covered head to foot in green velvet. Remarkably her return to Earth
coincided with the end of the school day. Madeleine is no fool - she is 8,
after all - and she knows that there was something oddly “prepared” about
the day. But I'm sure she will be first in line to read and write clues this
week when news breaks of the pirate treasure buried around the school.
Everybody Writes
is run by Booktrust with the National Literacy Trust. The first
Everybody Writes Day will be held on Friday
