Club Author Day hosted at Foundation
This year we took the opportunity to host a Club Author day through partnership with the Premier League and the National Literacy Trust.
The Day was delivered at the Broadfield Stadium as one of only 14 clubs in the football league to be asked to take part. We gave stadium tours with football and active literacy sessions outside on the ball court. We were very pleased to have workshops spearheaded
by local author Will Mabbitt.
Mabbitt is the author of children’s books The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones and I Can Only Draw Worms; and he visited the club to give exciting and engaging workshops to students from the Bewbush Academy and Woodgate Primary School.
The idea of the day is to engage young people to engage creatively with spelling and writing and to foster an excitement in reading, author Mabbitt talked about the day:
“In the reading I’m reading a picture book and one chap from chapter book to the kids and we're going off and we're putting those two stories together to do a bit of drawing. The picture book is all about worms so were starting off with a really simple picture of a worm and then we’re working it up slowly step by step using the kids imaginations and some inspiration from the chapter book to create these crazy worm-based monsters.
This sort of day is so good for getting kids who might be a little bit reluctant to pick up a book get excited about stories get excited about creativity and writing. Throw in a little bit of football and some inspirational people from the world of football and you’ve got a really good recipe for building loads of excitement.”
Our Football and Sports Participation Manager David Kingston delivered on the day and was pleased to hold the event:
“The Community Foundation is heavily based on football and multi sport sessions; but things like this, when we go into schools especially with our Premier League Primary Stars programme, we go in and deliver a lot of literacy and maths sessions. So to have something like this is so important to engage kids with different ways of learning and get them to enjoy reading and writing. Having someone like Will Mabbitt was fantastic as he is is getting them to use their imaginations as well as giving them a read of his book.”
On the same day our Head of Foundation Darren Ford was on hand to give first-team defender Nick Tsaroulla the Professional Footballers Association Community Champion Award 2023.
Tsaroulla is regularly seen at Foundation events and sessions and Ford felt Tsaroulla was the obvious choice:
“Nick has always been very supportive of the Foundation and the work we deliver within the community. He is always the first player to volunteer to visit our programmes and he takes a genuine interest in those who attend. This award hopefully shows our appreciation of the time and effort Nick makes in his support of the Foundation and this is the second
time Nick has won the award in the past three years - the challenge is set for him to make it a hat-trick of wins as we move into the new season.”
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