School visits

Jennifer is available for interactive author talks and creative writing workshops for years 7 – 13. Please see testimonials below and contact Jennifer on jennifer.burkinshaw@gmail.com

Drawing on all she has learned about the craft for writing during and since her MA in Creative Writing, Jennifer’s writing workshops will be tailored to your needs and focus on a choice of descriptive or narrative writing.

Descriptive writing workshops use an extract from ‘Igloo’, when the protagonist, Nirvana, discovers a real igloo for the first time as a springboard, before moving on to brainstorm, plan and draft descriptions of students’ own happy places.

Narrative writing workshops always involve a focus on story structure. Jennifer’s Meeting a Mysterious Stranger session uses an extract from ‘Happiness Seeker’ as an example for participants’ own structured stories.

Drawing on her twenty years of English teaching, Jennifer also provides writing clinics for English Language GSCE students seeking support for the creative writing questions. These would be tailored to schools’ particular syllabus.

Jennifer can offer a range of workshops for KS3, 4 and 5

Writing workshops have become something of a speciality, ranging from sessions tailored to support your curriculum and writing for different purposes, including narrative and descriptive, to the purely creative opportunities. Using carefully-selected excerpts from Happiness Seeker and Igloo, Jennifer's method tends to be to take a theme suggested by her books, such as meeting a mysterious stranger, and giving the students tools to layer up a brainstorm and plan before beginning to write. Story structure is always at the heart of the workshop, as well as character building, of course, genre, setting and voice.

Jennifer also offers interactive author visits to support reading for pleasure, including for more reluctant readers.

Fees

Jennifer is happy to do up to three workshops a day plus free meet and greets at break/lunchtime.

For more details and fees, please email jennifer.burkinshaw@gmail.com and general@caboodlebook.co.uk

We invited Jennifer to do a day of creative writing workshops at Skipton Girls' High School and it was an outstanding experience. We had three workshops throughout the day (Y7&8, Y9&10, Y11&12) and Jennifer tailored them perfectly to suit the different age groups. The focus of all the workshops was on writing from the heart within a structured format, and Jennifer modelled the different story beats using examples from her own books (Igloo for the youngest group, Happiness Seeker for the older two). The students created their own stories in stages, using brainstorming and writing, as the workshop progressed, and they all went away with the building blocks to develop their stories further in their own time (which they have been excited to do!). I would wholeheartedly recommend Jennifer's workshops - they were fun and informative, and with her previous experience as an English teacher, Jennifer pitched the different sessions just right.

Katharine Walkden

Librarian

Skipton Girls' High School

Jennifer’s workshop, using Happiness Seeker as a springboard, was a real inspiration to our Y9 students and really helped to fuel their imagination for creative writing. This has helped tremendously in our preparation for AQA GCSE English Language Paper 1 - not just for section B creative writing but also section A, reading fiction. To hear from a real writer rather than just reading an extract, has helped bring it off the page and make it real. We’re busy planning Jennifer’s next visit!!

Head of English, Calderdale school

testimonials

"Jennifer provided an excellent year 7 creative writing workshop. Students were engaged and enthralled. It gave them the chance to really hone their descriptive writing skills in preparation for their English Language exam."

Calderdale School

"Thank you so much for your lovely visit, Jennifer. The students really enjoyed it and have been requesting your book."

Bradford School

"Thank you so much for your assemblies for World Book Day. The presentation on your writing journey was particularly valuable for our students. It was a pleasure working with you."

Barnsley School

"The session on the start of Happiness Seeker was inspiring and very enjoyable. Thank you."

Calderdale School