Last month I did a series of writing workshops with elementary students at a local Edmonton School during a 2-week artist residency. Throughout my visit, each class created a different story, collectively ending up with a series of 11 fully illustrated stories.
One my my favourite stories (actually, they’re all my favourites), is this one written with one of the grade 6 classes. Scroll down to read a bit of the backstory ad see why I love this on so much.
Last year I did a few writing workshops at this same school, where the students and I came up with an outline for a story, including introduction, the plot points, and the ending, and then I illustrate one page for the story. One story which has become somewhat legendary was Pancake vs Waffle, a story about two breakfast foods competing to see who is the best while making a big mess of themselves (and the kitchen) in the process. The page I illustrated featured pancake and waffle racing around the kitchen riding on cats. In the end, the family comes down for breakfast, and when they see pancake and waffle they say ‘Eww, we’ll just have crepes”.
For this residency, I gave this class the honour of writing the last story for the collection, and I thought it would be a cool meta thing to call it ‘The Last Page’. Other than the title, I had no other prompts for the students. Little did I realize that we would eventually end up paying homage to a piece of the school’s history, and writing a story about two siblings writing the story of Pancake vs Waffle.
This is what I love about doing these workshops; when I showed up last year, I never would have dreamed that I’d be drawing a pancake and a waffle riding cats, and when I showed up this year, I never would of guessed that I’d be seeing pancake and waffle yet again.
For more information about school writing workshops in the Edmonton area (and beyond), click here.