Main information
- Date:
- Wednesday 31 October 2018
- Time:
- 11:00 am
- Location:
- Alyth Primary School, Alyth
- Author:
- Ron Butlin
This year BOOKMARK’s Authors in Schools programme was highly fortunate to have Ron Butlin spending Wednesday 31st October in Alyth Primary School with 320 children from Alyth, Meigle, Kettins and Kirkmichael primary schools. With an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist, Ron Butlin is a former Edinburgh Poet Laureate. He has published approximately 20 books, and his work has won many prizes and been translated into over a dozen languages.
He had fun with the smaller children with his verse-and-picture books Here Come the Trolls and Day of the Trolls. The wee ones, some already in Hallowe’en fancy dress, giggled as Ron talked about his revolting trolls and came up with spirited suggestions for making up stories. Ron’s riddles teased the P4 and 5 children, who then creatively invented some riddles of their own. The older P6 and 7 children heard heart-stopping passages from his page-turner adventure novel Steve and FranDan Take on the World and talked with Ron about ways of using imagination for writing their own stories.
Additionally, hard-working staff from Blairgowrie High School rose brilliantly to the demands of this unusual day and orchestrated hugely creative art, drama and music workshops based on Ron Butlin’s books, with collaborative input from teachers from the four primary schools and ably assisted by BOOKMARK volunteers. The children loved it, as did Provost Dennis Melloy, who visited the school and couldn’t resist joining in the fun. BOOKMARK ran a writing competition, in partnership with Ron, for all age groups with book tokens as prizes.
The children’s comments included: “great fun”, “...been looking forward to today for weeks”, “loved the riddles”, “best bit was chop-chop” (from a drama session), and “when we were pattering the drums for rain it sounded beautiful”.
