The write stuff

During the months of April, May and June, the University Gozo Centre in Xewkija has hosted parents and children taking a course organised by the Foundation for Educational Services (FES).

It was a 10-session course lasting 20 hours. Twenty young children (The Young Writers' Club) have been trained in Writing Process skills. At the same time, their parents were in sessions doing similar activities.

The aim of the Parents' Writing Programme was to teach parents the new skills their children were practising during the sessions, thus enabling them to help their children implement what they learnt at the Young Writers' Club. Parents were very satisfied with these courses. Following are some of their comments:

"After being exposed to those different writing skills, we, parents were all amazed and surprised with the outcome. We discovered new ways of how to go about writing about different topics and different genres. We did poetry, stories, playscripts and journals. We had opportunities to write about our memories when listening to music, or about pieces of art and artefacts. We learnt that writing is fun because the skills that we learnt helped us to unfold our thoughts and put them down in writing with less effort."

"The activities were a very positive experience. We even had one session at Dwejra, away from our classrooms, together with our children where we just wrote what we were seeing or observing. Din L-Art Helwa opened the tower at Dwejra just for us and Frank Cauchi took us on a tour around the tower where we wrote a saturation report, which is another genre we learnt during the course."

"The session when we met George Camilleri, a Gozitan writer, was very interesting because our children had the opportunity to listen to his experience as a writer and ask him questions."

"My daughter writes with a lot more interest and willingness. Her school compositions have been graded with higher marks. Now she rereads her own compositions and makes her own changes. Thank you FES for changing my daughter's attitude towards writing."

The parents and children thank the team of tutors from the FES: Stephen Bonnici who coordinated the course with the help of a very dedicated and talented person, Miriam Galea, who was also the parents' tutor, and Fabienne Vella and Elizabeth Masini who taught and guided the children with patience, dedication and affection.