I offer science and maths based author school visits, standard author talks, specialist career industry talks for authors and illustrators or aspiring editors.
I love speaking at schools and events. I can be booked via CKT Speaker’s Agency or Speaker-Ink. Contact me direct or via these agencies for any questions. Some example workshops are below!
Workshop: Write what you know
How to get off a blank page
As an author who is also a publisher and teacher I have worked in every industry from writing to publishing to distribution, to bookselling, to the reader at the end.
Publisher Talks
The process from story to reader. Aimed at high school students. Can be modified for primary school students if they want to understand all the steps to getting a book to the reader. More information here.
Workshop: Write a Mystery Story
Who loves mystery writing?
Meet Riz Chester: Junior Forensic Scientist. Riz uses fingerprinting, sensory skills and much more to solve crimes. But writing a simple crime junior fiction has a few elements!
This 60-minute workshop will give you tips to help brainstorm new ideas and explore writing projects with mysteries in mind. Learn how to put together a mystery plot with characters, clues and some red herrings. This is a planning workshop.
Workshop: Show Don’t Tell Tricks for Teens
This workshop is aimed at older students (high school) who are already interested in writing as a career. Ideal for extension students
Short story/creative workshop. Improve and self-edit your short story skills.
Rochelle Stephens is an editor of three short story collections, the most recent Under a Different Sky and the publisher at Rhiza Press. Through this experience she can provide editing tips for your short stories.
Editing tips will help in school assessment as well as in the world of publishing if you want to write stories in the future. This could be useful in all levels of high school and can be catered with practical examples to the year level. Rochelle can help and give suggestions on the stories in the workshop. Maximum of 25 participants. Best with 15 or less and draft written stories.
What’s Fun in Publishing (For Grades 4-6). Am alternate author talk for large groups.
From Rochelle’s 16 years of experience as a publisher and from being published as an author by trade and educational publishers, she can talk about multiple aspects of publishing and how the process works. This interactive talk gets students involved and thinking about more than just writing stories. A big feature of this talk reiterates the value of editors and taking feedback from experts (including teachers!)
Rochelle presented to about 90 of our Year 4 and 5 students and kept them really engaged. The script she wrote for a few of our students to perform was both entertaining and informative about the publication process. She inspired plenty of relevant questions and there was a line up for her autograph at the end. Rochelle is a clear communicator, and, as a teacher herself, she knows how to relate to both students and teachers. S Morris, Highlands Christian College
Science Writing workshop
In this practical workshop we will explore some areas of science that you can use in our story writing. The workshop will explore interesting science facts that could be good to integrate into stories:
Types of rocks and minerals, fossils, plant growth, electricity, forces and movement, fingerprinting, moulds and tracking, bioluminescence in animals, plants and rocks, psychology and how your brain works
The workshop can be catered with practical science activities and then a story from any combination of these areas of science. As a high school science teacher and writer Rochelle will discuss the relevant areas of science before these workshops and work out what materials are needed to integrate into school curriculum and be relevant – for any years of primary school, in class sizes.
The perfect cross curriculum writing workshop! Workshop takes about 1.5 hours to include science activities and then story writing incorporating what is learnt. or smaller groups. Students need to be prepared for editorial feedback from the current market on writing and editing, which sometimes looks a bit different to in-school creative writing. We will look at show don’t tell, a great start to your story and first versus third person writing.