Visiting Author – Jane Godwin

On Wednesday popular Australian author, Jane Godwin, visited our Year 7 English students, to share her experience and offer valuable advice to help them with their Unit 4 imaginative writing task.

This Term the Year 7s are writing and performing a monologue which will reveal a perspective of a minor character form the novel ‘Wonder’ in response to a significant event. In order to complete this task they must consider their chosen character’s attitudes, values and beliefs, as well as their thoughts, feelings, emotions, opinions, and/or judgements about the event.

During her visit, Jane shared some of her writing experience with our Year 7s and discussed her processes for writing and creating believable characters and planning stories. Jane was an incredibly engaging speaker and gave students many useful strategies for writing characters, tips for how to create a character’s voice and write from a point of view. Jane also explained how to make writing three dimensional using detail gained by tapping into person experience, memories, research, and imagination. This information was extremely useful for the monologue writing task students are producing for assessment. Students also had the opportunity to ask questions and talk to Jane and her first-hand experience gave wonderful insights into the writing process.

About Jane Godwin

Jane Godwin is a highly acclaimed author of over thirty books for children, across all styles and ages, including picture books! Her work is published internationally and she has received many commendations, including the Queensland Premier’s Award (Children’s Books), the Aurealis Award and the Animal Welfare Award, and shortlistings in the CBC Book of the Year Awards, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the New South Wales State Literary Award (Patricia Wrightson Prize) the YABBA Awards, the Speech Pathology Awards, The Family Award for Children’s Books, and the Australian Book Industry Awards.

For many years, Jane worked as the Children’s Publisher at Penguin Books Australia. Nowadays, Jane lives in Melbourne with her family.  Most of her waking hours are dedicated to pursuing quality and enriching reading and writing experiences for young people, whether it’s as a writer, a publisher or a speaker/facilitator in schools.

Jane’s books in the iCentre

We have several copies of some of Jane’s popular books in the iCentre. Check out some of the covers below:

What an amazing experience for our Year 7 students!