Kate Williams
'Kate empowers the children from Reception to Year 6, bringing out the best, most adventurous vocabulary.'
Malmesbury Primary School, Wiltshire.
Contents
About Kate Williams
Kate Williams' School Visits
A Sample of Kate's Poetry
Recommendations & Reviews
Kate's Poetry Books
To make a Booking
About Kate Williams
Kate is a children's poet based in Cardiff, Wales. She has contributed to numerous children's poetry anthologies, as well as to national curriculum material.
Her poetry zooms up close to all sorts of subjects from all sorts of angles, through a rainbow of tones and moods, and often with underlying humour too. Her aim is to set minds ticking and imaginations roaming, while ensuring that her poems are accessible and meaningful to youngsters. She employs rhyme, rhythm, riddles and wordplay, as well as colourful, vivid imagery, to draw in her readers and share with them the fun and fascination of poetry.
Kate is keen to lift poetry off the page at every opportunity, with the help of art, music, movement and drama, and encourages this approach in her workshops. She is currently involved in an innovative project, for instance, in which school children are preparing a bonanza of poems with which to festoon Caerphilly Castle, as part of the Arts Olympics celebrations in 2012.
Kate has provided nearly 1,000 workshops for children of all ages and abilities, and is a tutor for the Able Writers' scheme.
Kate Williams' School Visits
Kate provides poetry workshops for schools across England and Wales. She works with children between the ages of 3 and 13 (ish), her aims being to fire imagination, inspire ideas, stretch language skills, and spur creative writing. Her sessions focus on expressive, rich, imaginative language, as well as poetic techniques.
Input stage: Kate uses pictures, props, discussion, word challenges, physical movement, and accompanying poems in her 30 minute preparatory inputs, plus acting-out and a song with guitar for KSI, after which children are geared up ready to write.
Writing stage: Kate provides her own tailored, graded and illustrated poetry frames as starting points from which children can take off. (Examples can be found on her website.) During the writing stage every child is given individual guidance and encouragement, and the session ends with a celebratory reading-out event in which each member of the group receives a congratulatory comment. If time permits, Kate rounds off with a class word-game.
Timetable: Kate normally provides four class-size sessions in a day, though this is flexible. Group sizes are also adaptable, with options of double classes in the hall at junior level, or 30 min. input-only sessions for Infants with follow-on sheets for teachers, if required.
Kate's workshops for able writers groups:
These sessions normally extend over a full school day, to allow time to develop ideas and writing skills through a range of poetic styles and techniques. Workshops are topic-based, with themes such as Ocean, Castle, Space, Jungle, City, or Wild Wood. For each topic Kate provides an array of pictures and relevant items, as above, and sometimes recorded music too, as well as example poems of her own to support each stage of the session. Through the day she introduces assorted ideas, styles and techniques, leading her group through a continual building process by pooling thoughts, forming word banks, sharing imagery, listing rhymes, testing rhythms, and more, with frequent opportunities for reading out along the way. The day culminates in a group-by-group performance at the end. Kate rounds off these sessions by encouraging children to carry on writing, and to email their poems to her for inclusion on the Young Writers' page of her website.
A sample of Kate's Poetry
The Trees Behind the Teachers' Cars
Autumn Term
Behind the cars the trees have turned to treasure -
red as rubies, gold as gold bars.
If Sir was a pirate
he'd be cramming his boot with booty,
except that it's really just leaves, of course,
gone bizarre.
First day back after Christmas
The trees have turned into wicked old witches,
clawing at the mist with gnarled fingers,
weaving white webs round their black broomstick hair,
to trap any teacher who lingers.
Spring Term
Emerald tips are
twinkling in the light,
drinking down the light,
thinking of opening up and soaking up the light
this afternoon,
or sometime soon.
That'll be a treat for Sir's car.
Summer Term
Now there's a special sun-lit green
- a yellowy, mellowy, melt-away green,
like a mermaid, or limeade, or lime marmalade,
or the sheen on Sir's car, now he's had it re-sprayed.
It's a magical green you just glimpse in between,
in long, leafy slithers and thin slitherines,
a sun-shiny shade I've never quite seen,
miracle-made.
Recommendations & Reviews
"The lesson was very exciting. I liked it when we got to write about the jungle. I would really like to do it again." Simeon, Ysgol Pont Sion Norton, Pontypridd.
"These poems move quickly down the page like animals might, unleashing rhymes and rhythms everywhere." Ian McMillan (poet, broadcaster, journalist and playwright)
"Kate Williams finds a subject, gives it a twist and hey presto, that little bit of magic a poem needs is conjured up." Brian Moses (poet)
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Kate's poetry books
Wildlife Poems, 2009, ISBN 9780953842841
Kate's poems feature in a range of children's anthologies by national and international publishers such as Macmillan, Oxford University Press and A & C Black. Her poetry has also been included in National Curriculum material.
To Make a Booking
To make an enquiry about Kate Williams, or any of the other authors, poets & illustrators listed on this website, please phone Trevor Wilson on +44 (0) 1535 656015, or email him at info@authorsabroad.com
Further information on Kate Williams is available from the following website: poemsforfun.wordpress.com