Reading Quest Giant Children's Party

On Saturday we took part in Reading Quest's Giant Children's Party at the South Oxford Community Centre. Reading Quest is a home-school literacy project. They go into schools, and work intensively with kids who are struggling with literacy, with the aim of increasing children’s confidence, knowledge and skills in reading and writing. They have an impressive track record - and once a year they hold a giant party, a celebration of reading and stories and attract some big name authors to help out.

This year the fantastic Korky Paul ran a drawing workshop. We obviously are biased, having had Korky at an event in the shop last Summer, but the man is a genius, and he gets kids fired up about drawing like nobody I've ever seen. He got everyone (parents included!) doing their own dinosaur portraits - and here are some of the results:

Local author Anne Pilling ran a poetry session, and staff from the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre were giving some great theatrical story sessions of some of Roald Dahl's best stories (including his brilliant version of Little Red Riding Hood).

Geraldine McCaughrean gave a story session, reading from her book of Greek Myths, but also encouraging the kids themselves to invent their own heroic stories using props, characters and familiar elements of Greek stories.

This culminated in one child being made into a Greek God (the kids really went into the whole dressing up - great fun):
Geraldine then signed copies of her books - she is a very busy author, and was incredibly generous with her time:

(That's a horse in the middle!)

All in all a wonderful day - and a nice end to quite a week!