Katherine Low Project

From February to April 2007, Children’s Discovery Centre (CDC) arranged for its authors and storytellers to work with the children and young people from the Refugee Home-School Project and Young Carers project at the Katherine Low Settlement in Battersea.

CDC authors, Margaret Bateson-Hill, Kate Corkery, Sola Oyeleye and Alex Wheatle, each lead four sessions with groups of young people, developing imagination and story creation through a range of activities such as playing word games, doing drama exercises, making masks, singing lullabies, creating characters, writing poems and short stories, and much more.

The project was funded by the Local Network Fund managed by the Peabody Trust. Thanks also to CDC’s primary funders Arts Council England and Wandsworth Council.

Read poems from the students who participated in the Katherine Low Project.

Feedback from students at the Refugee Home-School Support Project

“Thank you for all the fun you gave me.”

“You make me happy.”

“Thank you for everything. It was fun when we made our masks.”

Feedback from the Young Carers sessions

“I liked writing a story and doing drama.”

The best thing about what I did was listening to the storyteller and just having fun.”

Feedback from the authors

“The group really enjoyed riddles, short funny stories and word games.”

- Kate Corkery

“Great children and atmosphere.”

- Sola Oyeleye

“I think all the children made real progress in the afternoon session.”

- Margaret Bateson-Hill

“Another task I set them to complete was to finish a short story I had started. I wrote an opening paragraph to a horror story and the class had to complete it… Much fun and banter the group got from this exercise and they particularly enjoyed reading their stories out to the whole group.”

- Alex Wheatle