Preparatory students re-write Pymble history!

Tuesday 19 July, 2016

Q. Where in the world would you find cows in the pool doing backstroke, crunching carrots and munching marshmallows?

A. In a new children’s storybook written by class 2B with a little help from Mrs Jacqueline Harvey, bestselling children’s author of the Alice Miranda and Clementine Rose series and the Preparatory School’s 2016 Artist in Residence.

During Term 2, Mrs Harvey attended Pymble for a series of writing sessions designed to help each Year 2 class to create a children’s book based on an historical event at Pymble. The writing sessions generated great collaboration between the students and the author as they worked together to turn historical facts or past events at Pymble into rollicking good reads for young minds.

“Cows in the pool” references the late 1920s when cows grazed within sight of the first Pymble pool. Another book in the making revolves around the infamous visit from The Duchess of Gloucester in 1946, while the third story features the Pymble firetruck from the 1970s.

The girls enjoyed learning how to “paint pictures with their words” instead of simply “telling” how, what or why something happened. Mrs Harvey also encouraged the girls to re-read sentences to see how they could make their sentences stronger, more interesting and less repetitive.

“These sessions give the girls contact with someone who writes books for a living,” explained Mrs Harvey.

“It makes being a writer a much more accessible concept, as opposed to something that lives in their imagination, and shows the authentic ways in which writers work, including the generation of ideas, drafts and revisions.”

The Artist in Residence Program was made possible due to a Grant from the Pymble Ex-Students’ Union.