Edinburgh International Book Festival 2015

In August, Primary Three, Five and Seven were lucky enough to visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The book festival is now a key event in the Edinburgh festival season, celebrated annually in Scotland’s capital city.

Each year writers and illustrators from all over the world come to the book festival and incorporate amazing workshops for schools and visitors.

This year Primary Seven met Nick Sharratt and Vivian French. We were even lucky enough to be able to work with the two of them in an extremely detailed and enjoyable workshop.  They helped us to learn new skills that would help us all to improve our illustrating and writing. We learned about the start of Nick Sharratt’s career and the fact that he drew a market square at the age of nine and took it into school to show to his teacher and she thought it was good enough to be put up in the school hall! That was the day he became determined to, one day, become a professional artist.

After we had completed our workshop we continued to explore the book festival and discovered the bookshop. Most of the class had brought money to buy a book. We were fortunate enough to be given a discount voucher for three pounds off the price of any book of our choice.

At the festival there were ‘book doctors’. These were people that gave advice on books and helped you make the right choice before buying one or even a series of books.   Not everyone used the book doctors which is understandable because some people prefer to choose books themselves. I used the book doctor and found them really helpful.

Before we headed home, the last thing we did was spend time walking around taking pictures and meeting actors and actresses who were playing a variety of characters from all sorts of books. They were extremely good at playing their chosen roles.

Overall, everyone enjoyed the day and I hope that we can go back again, if not as a class, I will definitely go back with friends some day.

 

By Madeline Friel

Primary Seven