Literacy News

Take Your Writing to the Next Level with Louise Park

As part of the Student Excellence Program at Carnegie Primary School, selected students participated in an online ‘Writing’ workshop with a highly acclaimed author, Louise Park.

Louise Park draws from a strong background in Education, literacy and publishing to produce her blockbuster bestselling series fiction that includes Zac Power Test Drives and Spy Recruit, Boy vs Beast, Harriet Clare, D-Bot Squad, Star Girl, Bella Dancerella and her time-slip for older readers, Grace’s Secrets and Grace’s Escape.

This was an online event, held via Zoom and here are some recounts of the day.

The writing workshop with Louise Park was a unique writing workshop for chosen Yr 3’s, 4’s, 5’s and 6’s. It was a very enjoyable experience. Louise gave us tips on how to improve our writing and grew our interest in the subject. She showed us a sneak peak on her new book Grace’s Secret and used it as a great example for some of her tips.

This was a whole school, online workshop. We had some other schools such as Grey Street and Cockatoo P.S join in along with some other individuals.

Louise Park is a well-known author and grew our confidence. We would get turns to share our writing and receive productive feedback. She taught us 5 tips to improve our writing skills, how to plan before you write, write dialogue without saying ‘said’ and how to make your characters seem more real.

Upon getting the chance to do some writing of our own, all students produced fabulous pieces of writing.

The writing workshop was very productive, and everyone got to learn something.

Prisha J Year 6

Last Tuesday the 28th of February, some selected students from years 3 to 6 had the privilege of attending a workshop with Louise Park on Zoom.

It was a very interesting session, learning about how to make a piece of writing the best it can be. She gave us 5 important tips that will take our writing to the next level, and make the readers want to keep reading.

We tried changing up our dialogue, making it easier to read and understand, and to make it more captivating for our audience. Louise assisted us in a small paragraph of writing, trying to use all the tips she gave us.

Congratulations to all the students who shared their work and who attended the workshop.

Eliza A Year 6 

Literacy Leader

I really liked the writing workshop and meeting Louise Park. I especially enjoyed the writing part when we got to visualise a castle and teleport back in time. Louise Park also gave some real inspirational tips on writing about always writing down your ideas.

Lulu M  Year 4

She had 5 main tips for the students that I thought I’d share with you:

1. Put things in unexpected places (like the bottom of the ocean)
2. Keep secrets and have cliff-hangers – make your readers want to know things
3. Be mean to your character
4. Research – i.e. if you want to write about medieval times, make sure you do your research
5. Make your character vulnerable

Mr Acklom

Literacy Leader