Russell James can visit your school!
Hosted by author and illustrator Russell James, children are given the tools and the confidence to encourage their story telling and drawing.
The story telling and drawing visit can be adapted to different age groups and has been successful from prep to year 6. Lesson times vary from 45 minutes up to 80 minutes for the older classes
A teachers resource kit is supplied at the end of each class which includes the exercises used in the visit as well as other fun follow-up projects.
More detailed lesson overviews as well as different cost packages are available as a pdf file. Simply contact Russell using the 'About' page on this website.
Teachers Comments
INCREDIBLE, INFORMATIVE, INSPIRING!
Thank you so much Russell for your author/illustrator talk yesterday. It really was incredible! You obviously have a gift. Thank you for sharing your ideas and tools with the children. Everything you shared was so helpful and inspiring. The koala faces and scribble sketch were a highlight, but now I think of it, the whole presentation was a highlight! We loved reading your books too - I'll never look at the moon the same way again after reading Dig.
You used simple, yet effective keys to help children with drawing and story telling, and to unlock their imagination. Why didn't they teach us these things at University?
After your visit, the children were so inspired, that all they wanted to do was write stories and try illustrating themselves. Even some boys in my class, who were not very keen on writing were so excited and wanted to start their own stories straight away. Absolutely Amazing.
So thank you Russell, not only for teaching and inspiring my students, but also for teaching and inspiring me!
Keep up the wonderful work.
SEE YOU NEXT YEAR.
As a Teacher-Librarian, I am convinced that good stories can positively enrich our minds and build belief and hope into our lives as we each face our futures. Last Thursday, our visiting author Russell James shared many good stories with the young boys from Prep to Year 3 at Ipswich Grammar School.
Russell shared his stories live with books and with multimedia. He showed our boys how simple it was to express their moods and feelings on the faces of the koala drawings in front of them. It's hard for a bloke to express their feelings at any time, so I thought that was clever.
He then taught the boys creative problem solving skills with Scribble Sketch. The boys had shapes on the page in front of them. They needed to engage the creative side of their brains to make their own picture story. Though Russell made it look easy on the whiteboard, it was actually a skill they had never developed in the visually perfect world of mass media. Nevertheless, the boys followed his lead and played his game, coming up with some wonderfully imaginative story pictures.
The Ridiculously Easy Story Writing session encouraged the boys to think creatively on their feet, and use the type of skills they require for NAPLAN. The good readers came up with a wide variety of plots and scenarios while those boys who were stuck in the monotonous computer-game mentality repeated cliched themes. The teachers could see in the Teacher Resource notes Russell produced how to repeat this activity (and the others) in their class.
When Russell admitted to me later that he practised his drawing skills every day, it occurred to me the importance of the creative side of our curriculum (Art, Music, Drama and Graphics). As our boys face their futures where answers may defy all logic, it may be the possibilities from left field, the ideas from thinking outside the square, that may provide the inspired solutions for their own lives and those around them.
Thank you Russell for building our creative writers and inspired artists - our young courageous problem solving heroes of tomorrow. See you next year.
