World Book Day with Author Jamila Gavin

This year to celebrate World Book Day, on Thursday 5 March, we were joined by author Jamila Gavin. Jamila, who has written bestsellers such as ‘Coram Boy’ and ‘The Blood Stone’, led an assembly in the morning as well as workshops for our 4s students throughout the day.

In her whole school assembly, Jamila Gavin spoke fondly of how the best stories transcend cultures and travel across the world. Having been born in Mussoorie, India, Jamila experienced rich culture from both her Indian father and English mother. At the time, India was a melting pot of different cultures from all over, and this is where Jamila’s love of stories began.

She explained how some of the most well-known stories have many different variations across the world. One example she gave revealed that the earliest known version of ‘Cinderella’ came from China 2000 years ago! Jamila explained that as people moved across the world they took their stories with them. With no method of being written down and ‘set in stone’, stories have changed and evolved as they moved across the world and time has passed.

After asking our girls to think about their own stories, she asked each person to think about the question: “What journey brought you here to this very room today?”.  Jamila explained her belief that there is a story inside every one of us which is just waiting to be written down and shared with the world!

Jamila Gavin spent the rest of the day leading our 4s students in inspiring literary workshops. She used a range of interesting ideas to help unlock some of the stories our girls had to tell.

Jamila had brought three instruments with her: a singing bowl (used by monks in Nepal), a karimba (a traditional African instrument) and some wooden blocks. She played a short set of notes, and the class had two minutes to write down a few sentences of a story – from whatever came into their head.  They then read them out loud to the class, to emphasise the rhythm of the story, just like the instruments they were inspired from. Our girls came up with a range of different stories and scenarios, all inspired by the same sounds.

The next exercise was inspired by just one word: ‘door’. Jamila explained that the word ‘door’ has so much significance in many stories and often symbolises a threshold from one world to another. Students were asked once again to write down the first things that came into their heads, whether that was an extract from a story, or general musings about the word ‘door'.

Finally, our girls were set a task to work in pairs to write a short extract from a play script, following on from this introduction:

A: What are you doing here?

B: I’ve come.

A: I wasn’t expecting you to be here.

B: Well, I’m here. What are you going to do about it?

This introductory extract provoked many exciting, thrilling and funny responses from the class! Each of the girls’ play scripts were very creative, yet all told a different story.

Our 4s had a wonderful day with Jamila Gavin, exploring the endless possibilities that a story can bring. We would like to extend a big thank you to Jamila for joining us for an excellent World Book Day, and we look forward to the next one!