The National newspaper just ran this article at the weekend about our school residency at Holyrood Secondary.
You can also read it here: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17618286.holyrood-secondary-pupils-gain-confidence-with-metaphrog-project
We’ve just finished our residency at Holyrood Secondary, and the project has gone way beyond our expectations! We were hired by Glasgow Life/Glasgow Libraries back in September to deliver a 20 week long residency with pupils from the Roma community in Govanhill in Glasgow. They worked really hard at creating comics and drawings with our guidance and encouragement and made huge improvements in their reading and writing. Their confidence was also greatly improved. These kids had not long arrived in Britain and some of them could barely read, write or speak English and were thrown into a big school and were trying to keep up. We compiled their work into a finished book and they all received a copy at the celebration event.
What we didn’t expect was for the community and the media to take such an interest! From a single Facebook post which attracted a lot of attention we ended up on STV News at 6 with Ian Lebeter of Glasgow Life talking about the project. You can see the clip here: https://stv.tv/news/west-central/1432618-school-uses-graphic-novels-to-teach-immigrant-pupils/
The National newspaper also featured the work in an article you can read here: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17618286.holyrood-secondary-pupils-gain-confidence-with-metaphrog-project
We would like to say special thanks to Ian Lebeter at Glasgow Life for providing us with this opportunity and to the excellent librarian Fiona Kindness for her initial vision of the project and continuous help and support throughout. The project would not have been such a success without the support of the EAL department, Ms. McLaughlin, Mrs. McKellar and Mrs. Cooper, and also Mrs. McPhee the Principal Teacher Primary. We would also like to say thank you to the Cordia Linguistics interpreters, for helping with communication and with building reading confidence. Above all, thank you to all the young participants for all their hard work, creativity and enthusiasm. They should be very proud of the work they produced.
Finally saw the illustrations Sandra created for the Dick Institute and East Ayrshire libraries! Here they are at the lovely new refurbished and library and café. Libraries should all look as nice as this one if only they had enough funding.
We’ve just been appointed Graphic Novel Authors in Residence by Glasgow Life. Over the next 20 weeks, we’ll be working at Holyrood Secondary School with a group of pupils from Romania and Slovakia, helping them tell their own stories in comic form. Today was our first day. We introduced ourselves, and the project, with a presentation and two interpreters worked as we spoke – many of the pupils have just arrived in Britain and don’t speak much, if any, English. To be honest we weren’t sure how it would all work out! It’s the first time we’ve worked with interpreters in real time, but it was lots of fun! Looking forward to seeing the stories develop over the coming weeks. Thanks to Ian Lebeter, libarian Fiona Kindness and to the EAL teachers for their kind support.
We’re thrilled that The Little Mermaid is shortlisted for The Excelsior Award Junior 2018! You can see the full shortlist here:
http://www.excelsiorawardjunior.co.uk/shortlist2018.html
