BUDDING bards at Claverdon Primary School have been crowned as part of Shakespeare Week.
Run by independent charity the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare Week is celebrated annually in schools across the UK, to ensure youngsters have a positive first experience with the playwright.
Shakespeare Week 2023 was themed around creativity and involved a children’s book making competition titled ‘Write till your ink be dry’ to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the publication of The First Folio – the book that brought all of Shakespeare’s works into a single volume for the first time.
The competition, which was supported by Waterstones Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, received over 1,000 entries from school children aged between four and 11 years. After careful consideration, 16 winners were chosen. Their work is now exhibited in a free online exhibition.
And one of the school winners of the competition was Claverdon Primary School near Warwick.
Headteacher Dan Powell said: “We are incredibly delighted to have been awarded joint first place in this year’s Shakespeare Week Competition. We are beyond proud of the work each and every child in our school completed.
”We are incredibly lucky to live and teach so close to Stratford and have the opportunity to embed Shakespeare’s plays into our curriculum. Each year group focused on a different play and were given the opportunity to decide how to present their writing, artwork etc. in their own version of The First Folio. We were blown away by the children’s creativity and are very grateful to have this acknowledged by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.”
Shakespeare Week 2023 also featured online broadcasts with children’s celebrities including Michael Rosen, Ben Cajee, and Martin Brown from Horrible Histories, the publication and distribution of Volume II of Will’s Word Warriors to 10,000 children and special learning and performance events in Nottingham, Oxford and Newcastle, including the Shakespeare Week launch at Nottingham University’s Lakeside Arts venue.
The showcase events were supported by eight Shakespeare hub schools, involving a total of 300 children.
