On the 21st of November, we the children of 5th class were delighted to take part in a writing workshop called “Fighting Words” in The Museum of Country Life, Castlebar. We were very excited about this workshop and were looking forward to using our creative senses. We met with the leaders who were very nice, but to enter the room, we were given our first creative task which was to come up with a password before we could be let in. This was quite fun as it could be as silly as we wanted.

To begin the session, the leaders asked us to name and discuss words and phrases to do with creative writing. Once we mentioned the key parts, together as a class we brainstormed what kind of characters we wanted, names for them, their personality, the setting and plot etc. that we would like to have in our story. We took a vote on each aspect and the key parts of the story were set. As a class we complied the start of the story together. As we did that, Joseph McCafferty was listening and used his creative talents to create a cartoon of our characters. Each child was then given individual sheets of paper to write their own middle and end to the story. It was a very enjoyable day.

When we returned to school, and in the following weeks, we continued on with the first draft of our stories as we waited for the final draft with the cartoons to arrive. We were delighted to receive our beautiful individual books of our story which had plenty of blank pages and spaces for pictures for us to fill in. It even had our own photograph which they had taken on the day, a space to write about the author and for the critics view. We got to work on re writing the final draft of our individual endings and drew pictures to match. We brought them home to read to our families and they gave us their verdict and wrote it in the critics section at the back of the book.

Ms. Henry organised that we could read our stories to the infant classes just before the Christmas holidays and we were very excited about this. The children in infants particularly enjoyed the stories as they were about getting to meet Santa Claus. They were extra exciting because Santa was coming in a few days. It was a fantastic experience from start to finish and we hope we will get the chance to do it again.