Today was St David 's day and also World Book Day, and to help celebrate both, I'd been invited along to the local school to do a turn as Local Author. I'd decided that the thing to do was to invent a story with each class with a Welsh theme.
I got there and was hoping to see a flip chart and a selection of colour pens. Instead I was presented with a load of four and five year olds sitting on a carpet watching me look stupid as i did battle with the white board that they mastered on day one.
I thought we'd "story board" it and was glad when they decided their first character was a teddy: I can draw teddies. But then they wanted sheep, an owl and a dragon.
"What's that, Miss?" they asked.
"It's a dragon."
"No it isn't..."
They were right of course. There was no way it was a dragon.
The next class had me drawing dragons being hit with loaves of bread. The next had dragons fighting with lions (in a Welsh v England rugby match that mutated into the Lions getting their throats ripped out by the brave Welsh dragon - not too easy to stomach when you're English, even on St David's Day)
The final class had packs of beavors doing battle with mutant rats underwater. I gave up. By that time everything was a splodge, and a pretty crap one at that; the children didn't hold back.
They foolishly asked me back at the end of the day to hear the remains of the stories. The worst part of the day was to enter the hall and see 80 kids holding pieces of paper with my rubbish drawings printed out on them. Seeing your work "improved" by a six year old is humbling...
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Lorraine Jenkin is an author, journalist and blogger.
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