Author: Mechanical Dolphin

>Reading Partners – One to One Literacy Support in California and Washington D.C.

Mechanical Dolphin

>This week Books and Adventures crosses the Atlantic to feature Reading Partners.

This US non-profit literacy organisation, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, helps children to become lifelong readers by developing communities’ ability to provide individual literacy support.

I was particularly excited to discover the scheme as there are many parallels between Reading Partners and the UK literacy charity Volunteer Reading Help, on which you can find more here.

Reading Partners was founded in 1999. A retired school nurse, Mary Wright Shaw, was working in a neighbourhood of Palo Alto, California, when she discovered that many local children were unable to read the books provided in her clinic’s waiting room. Together with two friends, she committed to do something about this – and what was then the ‘YES Reading’ programme was born.

Now known as Reading Partners, the organisation has expanded throughout California and Washington D.C., serving over 1700 pupils and growing from a single trailer outside of an elementary school to 37 school sites.

Volunteers work on school campuses in 45-minute one-to-one sessions with children who need extra help to get their reading up to grade level. Many pupils, coming from homes where English is not the first language, may have stronger speaking skills, but still require support with reading and writing. Reading Partners, whose volunteers range all the way from high-schoolers through to retirees, records an 88% success rate in helping students accelerate their progress in reading.

Development Manager Allison W. Cohen joins Books and Adventures to tell us more.

‘Our model is scalable, high impact, and high quality,’ she explains. ‘In the past five years Reading Partners has grown by over 600% and maintained consistent results for students in the program.’

The Reading Partners scheme has its own curriculum, designed to California Department of Education standards in collaboration with experts from the Stanford School of Education. The organisation uses Houghton Mifflin’s RIGBY PM to assess student progress, alongside state standardized tests.

This commitment to providing measurable results makes Reading Partners an attractive option for charitable donors, as Allison makes clear: ‘Reading Partners gives donors measurable, tangible results that they can point to. It is easy to see how your money is being used and the value of that donation.’

Reading Partners has responded to the challenges of the economic climate by partnering with the federal AmeriCorps programme. As the charity becomes leaner and more efficient, plans for the future are optimistic: ‘We hope to serve at least 100 schools in the next three years and tackle the childhood literacy crisis on a national scale.’

You can find out more about Reading Partners, and read their report ’10 Stories for 10 Years’, here.

>Hansel and Gretel, Ghosts and Mirrors: Ignite 2010 at the Royal Opera House

Mechanical Dolphin

>On Sunday I managed to spend some time at the Ignite Festival in Covent Garden, thanks to a tip-off from Claire Massey’s Fairy Tale Cupboard.

Over three days, guest curator Joanna MacGregor had transformed London’s Royal Opera House into an enchanted zone whose magic permeated not only performance spaces but also foyers, cloakrooms and cafes within the building.

I guess it’s the academic in me, but my favourite part was the museum-styled Hansel and Gretel exhibition from Ghosts and Mirrors, Drama Centre London’s presentation of moments from opera in a living cabinet of curiosities.

Behind the doors of the subterranean Supper Rooms, visitors to Ghosts… found strange fragments from the world of opera, reworked as English-language vignettes by director Richard Williams, in minutely detailed sets by David Collis and Janey Gardiner.

An excerpt from Tosca, bringing us close to Scarpia’s interrogation of Cavaradossi, was almost too comfortable for anyone who’s spent a night on the sofa in front of Law and Order: high culture neatly equated to primetime police procedural.

At the other end of the spectrum, the scene from La Traviata, which allowed the audience to approach the mourners at the side of coffin, was almost unbearably intimate and felt almost intrusive to watch from arm’s-length distance.

After these tableaux and another taken from Der Rosenkavalier, it was a bizarre experience to step into the Hansel and Gretel room, and be addressed by the curators of a mocked-up museum exhibit, who anatomised the fairytale – and Humperdinck’s opera – through the academic presentation of an archaeological dig.

Laminated academic reports were passed around to visitors as the two scholars, deftly played by Alex Large and Michael Hanratty, explained their aim of obtaining DNA samples from a chicken bone and lollipops uncovered at a 1936 excavation in the German village of Rottweil.

A theory of ‘Old Crone Optometry’ was used to explain how ‘living in an over-aerated and artificially engineered gingerbread environment could result in a serious loss of response from the optic nerves’; similarly there was a ‘theory of crumb consumption’ and a display correcting factual errors in Engelbert Humperdinck’s account of the ‘Hansel and Gretel Incident’.

The atmosphere of W.G. Sebald-meets-Fred-Dineage was perfect, and the performers took every response in their stride, from visitors entirely ignorant of the folk tale through to more inquisitive, difficult types like me!

It would be lovely to see Ghosts… performed in a larger venue one day, with the Hansel and Gretel performers given more time to develop a thorough backstory to the project and slightly more rounded characters, but even in its current form this was far and away the pick of an outstanding line-up at Ignite 2010.

Claire Massey’s post, with information on the whole Ignite Festival, can be found here.

>Steve Killick Interview – Being Our Best at Cae Mabon

Mechanical Dolphin

>Storyteller and child psychologist Steve Killick returns to Books and Adventures this week, in advance of his workshop ‘Being Our Best: Bridging Storytelling and Positive Psychology’, run with Eric Maddern at Cae Mabon this month.

The four day event offers participants the opportunity to explore and apply the wisdom of traditional stories in the context of modern psychology.

Steve explains: ‘By Being Our Best we mean looking at the best aspects of human nature, love, creativity, compassion, co-operation, rather than our negatives: selfish, destructive, short-sighted ,fearful. In a sense, this is the symbolic struggle between good and bad that is played out in stories.

‘Stories have always been the most effective ways of transmitting ideas, values and beliefs essential in religion, mythology and simply learning how to live. Education without them is impoverished and, in my mind, impossible.

‘In the course Eric Maddern and I are running we look at what Positive Psychology, the study of wellbeing and optimal performance, and what the wisdom of traditional tales is telling us- and what they have in common- and there are some surprises there!’

Steve is concerned that, in a technologised world, oral storytelling should continue to have a place alongside other media. ‘Storytelling takes place without technology, just “eye to eye, heart to heart and mind to mind” as the proverb goes.’

Often, participating in this oral tradition involves retelling time-honoured myths and fables. This requires a delicate balance of respect and reinterpretation:

‘On one hand, you cannot just change a story on a whim. On the other hand, it is a dynamic thing that needs to resonate again in the present, rather than be a museum piece to be looked at and never touched.

‘A story is a message from the past to today. For me it is about making the tale live now – what values do we find in this story now? We don’t always know what the story meant in the past.’

As an example, Steve points to the radical renegotiations of traditional stories which have been popularised by the like of Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter:

‘Heinrich Zimmer said about myths that they have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding. If you are working with traditional material you do it with love and care. You retain the spirit and breathe new life: That’s what I think Carter and Gaiman have done fantastically. Carter’s reworkings, particularly, have contributed to the revival of interest in storytelling.’

There’s still an opportunity for participants to sign up for Steve and Eric’s journey of narrative exploration at Cae Mabon from 23rd-26th September. You’ll find more information on Steve’s site at http://www.wordsofwonder.co.uk/Cae-Mabon.html

>Birmingham Half Marathon – Fundraising for Volunteer Reading Help

Mechanical Dolphin

>

The best thing about July and August is catching up with all my teacher buddies on holiday.

Even though those supposedly ‘long’ holidays are actually pretty full of planning, paperwork, and getting your classroom sorted for September, we still find time to catch up for dinner and drinks and a few giggles. Even if, like me, you’re not actually tied to the academic year and should probably be in the office…

I was especially enjoying the wine and tapas this week, because today I start training for the Birmingham Half-Marathon on October 24th.

I’m running to raise funds for Volunteer Reading Help, after I found out that they need just £510 to fund their helper for 2010-11 at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent.

Just a few hundred pounds will pay for a year’s worth of one-to-one work with the children who most need support with their reading skills.

We’re off to a good start but every little helps, so click on the justgiving widget at the top of this post or head straight to justgiving.com/booksadventures to help out this marvellous charity.

You do your bit and I’ll do mine; I might even try and get my half-marathon time down to something creditable!

Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor

Mechanical Dolphin

Nnedi Okorafor is hardly short of positive reviews at the moment, but I just wanted to drop a few lines about her 2005 Young Adult novel Zahrah the Windseeker, which I picked up this month.

The book sees thirteen-year-old Zahrah venture into a forbidden jungle on a quest to find the antidote to a poison which has claimed her best friend Dari. On Zahrah’s travels there are encounters with giant scorpions, psychic baboons, and a city of gorillas, as well as the small-mindedness of Zahrah’s native town to contend with.

There’s been a lot of praise for both the Afrocentric sci-fi setting Okorafor has imagined, and for Zahrah herself as a strong, yet vulnerable and credible, heroine. However, what I really loved about this novel was its focus on the importance, and future of, the book.

The charming, rebellious Dari whom Zahrah must save is a hero precisely because of his bookishness. Dari may not be up to the jungle quest which Zahrah undertakes, but his thirst for knowledge, driven by reading, helps to upset the stagnant and self-satisfied society which Zahrah challenges.

An erratically functioning ‘digi-book’, The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, plays a vital part in Zahrah’s journey. Her relationship to this frustrating, inspiring piece of technology makes neat comment on the various brands of e-book reader, at once incredibly useful and unbelievably irritating. Every time she tries to access its pages for advice on a particularly fearsome beast, the otherwise indispensable guide can be counted on to malfunction.

The literary lineage of this chatty, occasionally useful device is hinted at by another reference, made in the novel by a talking frog which Zahrah encounters:

‘“Like every other human explorer I’ve met, you want to know the meaning of life […] The answer is forty-four. That machine was off by two,” the frog snapped.’

Which is up there with Doctor Who’s dressing gown as the neatest Hitchhiker’s reference you will see this decade!

Zahrah the Windseeker isn’t as jokey as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but somehow Okorafor has seen straight to the heart of the Hitchhiker’s series and the sense of wonder that permeates it.

She also makes a neat swipe at the current vogue for ‘adding value’ to books with interviews, extraneous material and reading-group prompts when Zahrah mentions her favourite novel:

‘I’d read it four times. But not once did I read the rambling thoughts of the author – on how to cook the perfect holiday fowl – that came stored in the digi-book along with the story. Of course, as I read the book, every ten pages a little window would pop up on the bottom, saying “Hey, why don’t you read a bit about my thoughts on glazed bush fowl? As you can see, I write brilliantly. I cook even better!’

You can find out more about Nnedi Okorafor at her website, The Wahala Zone, here.

>Interview: Young People’s Writing Squads

Mechanical Dolphin

>Today Books and Adventures features the Young People’s Writing Squads, an exciting scheme run by Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Authors.



The squads give gifted young writers in both English and Welsh the opportunity to work with professional writers to develop their talents.


“The idea of the Young People’s Writing Squads is inspired by county sports squads, where talented young footballers or rugby players are pooled together to give them the opportunity for specialised training,” says Elena Schmitz, Academi’s Schemes and Data Manager.


“Similar to these sports squads, the Writing Squads are intended for children who show particular ability and promise for creative writing. This does not mean that they have to get good grades in school, be particularly good at English or be able to spell exceptionally well – but they do need to be able to demonstrate an above average ability for being able to write creatively – they need to be good at inventing characters, stories or using language in an unusual way, for instance.


“The Squads are not only for the gifted and talented performers in school, but for those with an unusual talent and passion for creative writing. “


The scheme has been running since 1996. Today, over 40 squads operate across Wales. Squads of around 15-20 schoolchildren meet four to six times a year for special training sessions. Squad members are encouraged to remain a member of a Writing Squad for the length of their school career.


Together, each squad gets the opportunity to experience and develop different styles, genres and techniques with a variety of writers.


“The children usually come together for a half day and work with one or two professional writers on a specific topic,” Elena explains. “This can include short story writing, science fiction, script writing or poetry. Some Squads tackle more unusual themes, such as writing for magazines, graphic novels or journalism. Often, the children are asked to prepare a piece of writing in advance which they can develop and improve during the session.”


Many squads have a ‘usual’ local venue where they meet. This is often a library, arts centre or council-owned venue. Occasionally, Squads meet in a school, although this is the exception. Academi is keen for Squad activities to take place outside schools and outside school hours, to ensure participation is voluntary and not seen as a school activity.


“In some cases, Squad sessions take place in unusual locations,” says Elena. “They can involve trips to a gallery, train journeys (poetry on a train), museum visits or even residential excursions to an island (the Cardiff Squad regularly visits Flat Holm Island in the autumn). The children are then usually asked to react to their environment and write about the art they have seen in a gallery, for instance.”


Examples of work from a trip to Cardiff National Museum by the Bridgend Writing Squad can be found here.


Academi was awarded a Beacon Company Award by the Arts Council of Wales in October 2008. This allowed Academi to develop the Writing Squad movement, establishing new Squads where no provision had previously existed, as well as creating a new website and running a number of conferences, workshops and special events all over Wales. Funding from the award came to an end in March of this year. Elena expresses disappointment that the additional funding will not be continued beyond 2010:

“A lot of the additional Squad activities which took place over the last 18 months will not be possible due to the lack of funding. We have pointed out to the Arts Council of Wales that timing for stopping the extra funding could not be worse: just when additional Squads have been established after a lot of hard work, money runs out to maintain them. And this at a time of the worst recession in decades, when local authorities – who share the costs for running Squad workshops with Academi – are faced with budget cuts on an unprecedented level.

“Nonetheless, Academi is committed to the Squads movement and we will try to do as much as we can to support them. We will continue to invite Squad members to special events, such as the National Eisteddfod or Hay Festival and provide funding for Squad workshops on an ongoing basis from our Writers on Tour funding scheme.”


The Writing Squad scheme remains ambitious for the future, despite these challenges. Plans to establish new Writing Squads in languages other than Welsh and English proved more difficult than first anticipated, so Academi has focussed on increasing provision, events and opportunities for these communities.


“We hope that by providing more events in languages other than Welsh and English and by engaging more closely with the Urdu and Somali communities in particular, we will be able to create more interest in creative writing amongst parents and will in future be able to establish new Writing Squads in Somali and Urdu, for instance,” says Elena.

One example of this community engagement is the joint Urdu-Welsh poetry reading organized by Academi and Swansea University at this year’s National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale.


Academi continues to welcome new Squads, particularly in areas where no Squads have yet been established, such as Anglesey or Rhondda Cynon Taf, as well as those areas where only limited provision exists.

“If teachers are interested, we’d recommend they contact the existing Squad Organiser in their area to start with, to see how their school can get involved,” says Elena. Details for the Squad Organisers in each area can be found at www.writingsquads.org/new-squads/, and if no Squad currently exists in your area, local teachers and librarians can contact Academi at http://www.writingsquads.org/contact/ to see how a new Squad can be established.


Our thanks to Elena Schmitz at Academi for speaking to Books and Adventures about this exciting scheme. You can check out the Squads’ site at http://www.writingsquads.org/

Next on Books and Adventures: carnivals, South America….and another visit Down Under!

Into the Hoods…

Mechanical Dolphin

It’s been a busy week for me at work and play, with not much time for the blog.

Coming very soon, you can expect South American carnivals, charity news and hopefully a couple of interviews, but for now you’ll have to make do with my review of ZooNation’s hip-hop/fairytale dance show Into the Hoods, over on Claire Massey’s excellent blog, The Fairy Tale Cupboard:

http://thefairytalecupboard.blogspot.com/2010/08/guest-post-matthew-finch-on-zoonations.html

Hasta luego,

Matt

>VRH Interview with Julie Nixon

Mechanical Dolphin

>Our third and final VRH blog arrives!

The tough economic climate, and forthcoming budget cuts, affect companies, charities and public sector bodies alike. UK readers may have seen Karl Wilding from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on the television recently, talking about the NCVO’s concerns over the impact of cuts in public sector funding of charities.

Charities like Volunteer Reading Help provide an effective means of supporting children who are struggling with their literacy skills. Just a small gift of three hours a week during school term-times can make such a huge impact on the life of an individual child – and VRH is going from strength to strength in 2010.

‘We’re so proud of increasing the number of children we help by 18% this year,’ Julie Nixon, Director of Services at VRH told Books and Adventures. ‘I foresee many opportunities to provide schools with vital 1-to-1 sessions for their children. We are a cheap alternative to many reading schemes which cost far more, and our intervention is also about the whole child.’

My visit to the Birmingham offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this month opened my eyes to the generosity of firms who work with voluntary sector organisations like VSO. In addition to donating funding and the time of their staff, Julie tells me that PwC also provides rooms to host VRH functions free of charge, giving the charity a vital inner-city base of operations.


Looking to the future, Julie tells Books and Adventures, ‘It would be great if companies would sponsor a local school’s VRH activities, our website, or some of our marketing materials. The support of firms like PwC is a tremendous help.’


To find out more about VRH and how you can get involved, see their website, here.

In additional news, I’m pleased to announce that on October 24th I’ll be running the Birmingham Half Marathon to raise sponsorship for the VRH activities at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent, my former base as a VRH Helper. More news nearer the date!

The power of the land: Patricia Wrightson and John Gordon

Mechanical Dolphin

I felt that it was time to get back to nature here at Books and Adventures.

A few weeks ago, I found out via Judith Ridge, Young People’s Literature Officer for Western Sydney, that Patricia Wrightson had died. I was pretty ignorant about this acclaimed but controversial Australian children’s writer, so I ordered up The Song of Wirrun, three linked quest stories describing the efforts of a young man to protect his land from troubled spirits.

The trilogy is incredibly powerful – I really hadn’t experienced anything like it since I heard The Iron Man and Beowulf told on the BBC when I was a child. The background, a blend of Aboriginal beliefs, is powerfully evoked as humans and spirits alike are threatened by the misadventures of magical beings. When the delicate balance of nature is upset, one young man, Wirrun, finds himself called to save his land and restore some kind of order.

Our heroes’ quest across Australia is thrilling, but undercut with a deep melancholy. Wirrun and his allies face much sadness and loss on their travels. The second story, The Bright Dark Water, finds Wirrun united with a girlfriend and ready for a ‘happily ever after’, but the ambivalent conclusion, Journey Behind the Wind, complicates matters and challenges us as readers to think about love, forgiveness and the nature of victory.

By chance, the next book I picked up after The Song of Wirrun was John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow. This British children’s fantasy from 1968 also takes its sense of landscape and native magic very seriously.

Jonk, a girl on a school trip, is separated from her group and stumbles across what appears to be a giant hand buried in the woods. Taking a treasure that she finds there, Jonk finds herself drawn into the final stage of a centuries-old battle between an invading warlord and the mysterious local spirit Elizabeth Goodenough.

There’s so much to recommend about this book – the unsentimental portrait of the teachers who lose Jonk on the school trip, the terrifying monsters unleashed by the warlord, and the sense of deadly high stakes for the children caught up in a plot to revive the ancient Green Man. For me, the exciting thing shared by both The Giant Under the Snow and the Wirrun books, is the sense of respect for the power of the land.

Both John Gordon and Patricia Wrightson’s spirits show a great sense of territory, and the landscapes they evoke are as powerful as they are distinct from one another. Wrightson’s spirits literally turn the world upside-down, travel through the Australian rock, or call a new Ice Age into being – but they do so with a healthy respect for the laws of territory and trespass. Gordon’s benevolent Mrs Goodenough is barricaded in her forest retreat by the evil “leather men”, while the warlord’s power gradually seals off Norwich along the lines of its old city walls. It’s also interesting to note that the heroes in both stories are given the power of flight by benign spirits, allowing them to survey their native land from a new perspective, and cross the supernatural borders.

Great children’s books are coming out all the time, but it’s also good to treasure books from the past, and it would be a real shame for either of these works to be forgotten. They’ve aged well and as fantasy stories they have a special quality: serious without being solemn. I love the high adventure of books like Skulduggery Pleasant or Artemis Fowl – when Skulduggery blows the front door off Stephanie’s house in the first book I stood up and cheered! – but there’s also something cool about stories where you really feel something is at stake.

There’s so much more to say – particularly about Patricia Wrightson’s work – but it will wait until a future blog post. Tonight I have gardening to do: the closest I get to the power of the land these days is pulling out fence-posts with a pickaxe…