Tim Harris visited our College to do a writing workshop with the Year 6 students.
Tim is the bestselling author of several laugh-out-loud series for kids, including Toffle Towers, Mr Bambuckle’s Remarkables and Exploding Endings. His first ever book, Exploding Endings: Painted Dogs & Doom Cakes, was awarded Honour Book at the 2017 KOALAs. Tim’s second series, Mr Bambuckle’s Remarkables, contains his trademark quirkiness, mixed with a touch of poignancy. The lead book was awarded a CBCA Notable in 2018, and the series was shortlisted for the REAL Awards in 2018 and 2019. His books have been published in Australia, the USA, Poland and Turkey.
Some ideas that Tim talked about were:
1). Vocabulary awareness. Extremely important. The power of words writers need to tap into.
2). Ideas – the students wrote down things they could find under the sand. Tim asked them how many had put ‘shells’. Most of the students had ‘shells’ in their top 5. Tim said that often your best and most unique ideas come to you later.
3).Re-write sentences bringing them to life:
4). Ear versus eye. Using speech marks – it accelerates the drama. They help the eye by showing who is talking. You need to say who is speaking and also how the person is speaking e.g. use ‘ranted’ rather than ‘said’ if you want to convey anger or e.g. “I went to the zoo,” I replied softly. His eyes swept over me. Tim then changed the whole mood of the short piece of writing by changing a few words – suddenly the piece became humorous rather than angry. See the photos for this example.
Mrs Emma Harris
Year 1,2 & 3 Coordinator
