Writing Together 2005

Case study: Big Fish, Little Fish

The Writers in Schools Project is funded by Cripplegate Foundation and supported by CEA@Islington and the London Borough of Islington. Since it started in January 2003,the project has reached over 1,300 children in 28 projects in 15 different schools in South Islington, offering residencies of up to 8 days a term and a ‘menu’ of options, which includes creative writing, plays, Victorian children, Black History, science and a transition to secondary school project.

Summary

‘Big fish, little fish’ – transition to secondary school project (2003 and 2004)

This project, which aimed to help Year 6 pupils with transition to secondary school, was piloted in Hugh Myddelton Primary School in Islington in 2003 and ran again at both Hugh Myddelton and Moorfields Primary the following Summer Term. The pilot concentrated on exploring hopes, fears and expectations about secondary school through drama and writing in a 7.5-day residency with children’s writer, Neil Arksey. The children wrote poignantly about their feelings, including one who said: ‘It’s not really a great feeling leaving primary school. It’s like leaving your childhood.’ All the children’s pieces of writing were typed up and put into a loose-leaf file for use as a resource for future Year 6 pupils.

The project used a ‘before and after’ model, in which children write about what they think it will be like in secondary school and then some of them come back to primary school as a new Year 7 to write about what it was actually like and to take part in a panel to answer questions. In the second year, Summer Term 2004, we added more practical strategies on helping children to cope with low-level bullying, explore conflict resolution and make new friends, using role play, forum theatre and improvisations so that children could rehearse what they might say and do in a difficult situation in secondary school before writing it down.

Big Fish, Little Fish

‘Big fish, little fish’ – transition to secondary school project (2003 and 2004)

The idea for a transition to secondary school project originally came from Hugh Myddelton Primary School in Islington, as it was clear to teachers that Year 6 pupils needed more help, in particular the opportunity to explore their hopes, fears and expectations through writing. The Writers in Schools Project developed this joint writing/pastoral support project with children’s writer, Neil Arksey, who called it ‘Big fish, little fish’ after a similar project he had done before.

Neil did a 7.5 day pilot residency at Hugh Myddelton in Summer Term 2003, with two Year 6 classes. We felt the children could express their feelings about going to secondary school more freely by inventing characters who would ‘speak’ for them in a first person narrative, using the setting of an imagined first week at secondary school, but they could also write ‘as themselves’, if they wished, using non-fiction statements. For example, one child wrote: ‘It’s not really a great feeling leaving primary school. It’s like leaving your childhood’, while another said, by contrast: ‘I feel very excited about going to secondary school. I am not scared one bit because I’m not the kind of girl that makes mortal enemies.’

The drama into writing model that was used worked very well as the children could verbalise and act out many of their ideas before having to write them down. Developing their characters through role play, ‘hotseating’, character monologues and short sketches, a large number of children explored their fears through their fictional characters: ‘I told her [a girl from Year 8] about the girls who were bullying me. She took my hand and told the girls not to bully me and the girls shaking in their bones, said sorry and scuttled away’. Others wrote about issues such as being pressured into smoking: ‘I couldn’t believe it they were in my year and they were smoking in my year and then to make matters worse they asked me if I wanted one.’

As well as these not unexpected fears about secondary school, quite a few children wrote about not being listened to at home: ‘I wanted to tell them about my day, but they were so busy, mum was on the computer and dad was writing, so I knew one person I could go and that was grandma. I finished my work and went to grandmas; I loved her house it was like a hiding place to me’.

All the children’s pieces of work were typed up, colour-printed, laminated and put into a loose-leaf file as a valued resource for future Year 6 pupils, which gave a real purpose and audience for their writing. After coaching from Neil on reading aloud effectively, they also did rehearsed readings of their work for other classes in the school and for their parents, which was very well received.

Comparing ‘before and after’, nine of these children came back to Hugh Myddelton in the Autumn Term, three months later, to act as a panel for a question-and-answer session with the new Year 6s who were eager to hear what secondary school was actually like. They also wrote their ‘after’ pieces, which provided interesting contrasts to the hopes and fears they had expressed in the ‘before’ pieces. (Basically, secondary school wasn’t as bad as they had feared.)

Building on this experience in the pilot residency, the following Summer Term, we had two ‘Big fish, little fish’ projects running, one back at Hugh Myddelton, with Neil Arksey, and the other at Moorfields Primary, with actor/playwright, Paul Herzberg, who did similar work, but with more emphasis on drama.

We decided to add practical strategies to help children cope with low-level bullying, explore conflict resolution and make new friends. Some of this was based on an interview with anti-bullying mentors from a local secondary school, who gave good advice to new Year 7s, for example, to take bullies by surprise and say something like ‘Thank you’ and walk away. (This strategy was tried out by Year 6 pupils in role play and it worked.)

In Hugh Myddelton, Neil Arksey wanted the children to see how important it is to redraft your work, so he brought in some of his work-in-progress on a children’s novel. Using the interactive whiteboard, he showed how he himself went through draft after draft until he was happy with what he’d written. Though many children do not like redrafting, these Year 6 pupils came to see the purpose of it, having had a professional writer demonstrate the process and seen the improvements (a few of them actually suggested by the children themselves).

The second half of the Summer Term is often rushed, but when the time came for the rehearsed readings, all the children had finished their pieces of work. They were so proud of what they had done that none of them wished to have their piece of writing read by someone else in order to preserve anonymity.

When 11 of these children came back to Hugh Myddelton three months later as new Year 7s, looking a head taller, they followed the tradition now in place at the school and took part in a panel to answer questions from new Year 6s. At the end each child was asked to give one piece of good advice, which ranged from ‘Find large friends to stick up for you’ to ‘Don’t act like a boffin’.

When they typed up their impressions of secondary school, one said: ‘I have settled into my new school and got some good praises off of the teachers and the best thing was getting picked for the school football team and scored a great goal. And the bad thing is that there’s no girls [to] chat up. But that is not so bad’, while another one wrote succinctly: ‘When you come at the first day, just play it cool and don’t act flash.’

‘Big fish, little fish’ is a residency with a purpose beyond the writing, which is to help children to settle into secondary school. However, even though the writing is a means to an end, it has been consistently impressive and has, we hope, helped the children to explore hopes and fears, sharing them with others, and to rehearse situations that might help them to cope better in secondary school. Ideally, such a transition project would run over the whole of Year 6, with sessions more spread out, and carry on into Year 7 for maximum benefit to the children.

Pat Farrington Project Manager Writers in Schools Project Feb 2005