Friendships – how to make them, maintain them, be good at them – are incredibly important for children. Darren Chetty’s new picture book, “I’m Going to Make a Friend” is about a child who, impatient to make a friend in a new place, builds a friend of their own. It’s a beautiful, brilliant book that in very few words explores some of the tensions within friendships and opens up many philosophical questions for a wide range of ages.
Jason was commissioned to write some resources for it which you can read here. Jason is hosting a Meet the Author event with Darren this Tuesday 16th June at 7 p.m. on Zoom. To make it as easy as possible to attend, here’s the link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89885364112
We’ll be sharing the book, using some of the philosophical activities from the resources, talking about the process of writing a picture book and also discussing the choices made for this particular book – such as having characters that aren’t clearly coded for race and gender as in most stories.
It would be lovely to meet lots of readers of the bulletin at the Zoom – Darren and Jason are old friends and you’ll be able to enjoy the event as a general-purpose adult with your own views and experiences of friendship as well as as a teacher.
What’s on in the Philosoverse?
An awful lot! Hence the absence of a bulletin last week. Tom has been testing “The Interview Wheel”, a brilliant new activity for Hidden Leaders which went down a storm with sixth formers and running the first of our in-school oracy competition days as part of our work with Essex County Council’s Year of Opportunity. Jason has been enjoying the Sophia Network Meeting of P4Cers from around Europe in Prague, hosted by Czech charity People in Need who he’s been working with for years and who are making great strides spreading P4C. and was at St Edmund’s in Wolverhampton to run philosophy and debating workshops for more able and talented groups.
Enquiries for oracy training for September onwards are coming in thick and fast and we’re also juggling resource creation work for the National Trust and Oxford University – so a mix of big collaborations and our usual work with individual schools.
Today in a change of gear we’ve both been called up for activity duty today for a big DofE expedition for Outspark, another of our group of enterprises, so let’s hope the rain holds off near Tunbridge Wells!