Arranging Author Visits

One of our very favourite things is when we are asked to organise an author visit for a group of schools. This usually coincides with being asked to develop a teaching sequence (a series of lesson plans that build upon one another) to complement a text. The reason we love doing this? Whenever we develop teaching sequences, audience and purpose for writing always take centre stage, and who better as an audience and a purpose than the author of the book being studied in the classroom. We always ensure that children have had time to read the book first, reflecting and responding to it before going on to create some really quality writing from it in advance of meeting the author. This ensures that, when the day of the visit eventually arrives, children are properly immersed, engaged and excited about the experience, and they have some quality writing to show off!

At the beginning of this year, we were lucky enough to work in partnership with Abrams and Chronicle to organise a series of school visits for one of their most exciting authors, Tom Angleberger, who has written the ‘Origami Yoda’ series of books. We began by developing a teaching sequence for Year 5 and 6 children. For this, we decided to go down the route of discussion texts – is Origami Yoda real and can the future ever really be predicted? Of course, we didn’t miss the opportunity to include a mini-project where children wrote instructions for and made their own origami creatures. You can find the full teaching sequence here. All schools followed the complete sequence of lessons prior to the visit, and the outcomes were really quite marvellous.

Having been immersed in the language and stories created by Tom, it was immediately tangible that the children got so much more out of the experience than if they had met him ‘cold’. It was heart-warming to see a group of children whose usual definition of ‘celebrity’ would have been stars of reality television, suddenly judging a writer by the same set of criteria and then queuing up to buy not one, but all three books in the trilogy to take away with them. The quality of the writing was evidently improved from having been given such a distinct purpose for writing and the children loved sharing their freshly-penned work. Tom’s abundant energy meant the visit itself was as exciting as the build-up to it! The questions asked by the children showed that they had thought deeply about the themes and content of the book.

Later in the year, we developed a teaching sequence for Irfan Master’s wonderful A Beautiful Lie. This longer piece of fiction lent itself tremendously to being used as a transition text studied at the end of Key Stage 2 to prepare for secondary school. Set in 1947 at the time of partition in India, it explores the themes of friendship, family relationships and, perhaps most significantly, what it means to tell a lie. You can find the complete teaching sequence here. We recently organised for Irfan to visit some of the schools that had completed the teaching sequence.

For these schools, to finish the teaching sequence by actually meeting the author was not only an enjoyable experience, it also reinforced the reason for them writing in the first place. The children had already produced some really excellent pieces of extended writing, creating their own ‘Beautiful Lie’ stories, and were buzzing with excitement on the day of the visit. As well as listening to Irfan talk enthusiastically about his book and what it’s like to be a real-life author, children were able to extend their understanding of the book by asking questions to Irfan and, in turn, answering his questions to them!

So, working with authors and publishers gives us an opportunity to combine some things we feel are very important: developing teaching sequences for some wonderful texts and encouraging children to produce really quality outcomes by presenting them with a tangible purpose for writing. We have been lucky enough to see some very excited children this year as their new favourite authors have popped in for a visit and know that this has helped engender a love of reading and writing and opened the door to a world of new authors and genres not previously explored.

For more information about developing teaching sequences or arranging author visits, go to our partnerships page.