It was great to see children joining up for the online author session with the Bracknell Forest Library today. With so many children burnt out from screen time, I didn’t think I would get to see such enthusiastic faces and share ideas with like minded creatives during our hour long session.
The start was a bit wobbly with my early entry into the Zoom meeting, which reduced the time available. Luckily, the super librarian, Sarah, created a link to a second session so that we could continue with story time once the first session timed out. Moofy and Flo took their debut, sharing their story of how things can sometimes go wrong when helping friends. The children responded well to the story and gave a thumbs up to my questions about helping others.
We then moved on to a second story for the older children called Cecil the Bully. Reading it aloud reminded me of how much fun it is to capture villains we encounter in our every day life. The children engaged with the story and were happy to continue after an interruption in the session to click onto the new link. We broke the story telling up with an activity of creating our own villains. What an amazing bunch of children! Some very creative ideas came out of the session and very inventive names for their villains. A very talented boy called Andrew even had time to draw his robotic villain and shared the illustration at the end of the session.
Cecil and his gang didn’t get to finish their tale of slapstick pranks at the Easter Sticky Competition, but I do hope the children enjoyed their time listening to the stories and the illustrations which I posted on the shared screen. It was a very different session compared to the face to face meetings we usually have in the library. As the world evolves and changes to the circumstances we are now presented with, we will continue to adapt and apply our skills to entertaining and educating the children online. After all, the children today proved that you don’t need excessive amounts of time to create villains, and the super heroes required to fight them.
Feedback from today’s session:
“Dear Bracknell Library,
I wanted to say how much my son and I both enjoyed Elouise’s virtual story time this morning.
Eloise De Sousa’s session was so enjoyable. She tailored the story time so that it was suitable for all ages; I saw children from KS1, aged 5-7 AND KS2, aged 7-11 engaging with the session and it was clear everyone especially loved the work-shop style element at the end of her readings.
Thank you so much for providing these free of charge to families during this difficult time. It really has raised our spirits this morning and my son is now inspired to start writing a new book!
Many thanks once again,
S.J. Grindley”
E. De Sousa 