Thirty-Fifth S.Anselm's Reading Competition
'If you want to please an audience, make them laugh; if you want to move them, make them cry.' These are wise words, and this year's finalists certainly took them to heart. Both Seniors and Juniors entertained a large audience of pupils, parents and staff in the Hargreaves Hall with a wide and varied repertoire of prose and poetry. Among the amusing pieces read by the juniors were Eeyore Has a Birthday (Gabriella T), Adrian Burrows's Pig Poem (Eleanor T), and Carol Ann Duffy's Chocs (Nicholas T). Charlie L gave us a passage from Ted Hughes's gripping fantasy The Iron Man and also Blake's A Poison Tree - a demanding choice for an eleven-year-old. Ella N skilfully contrasted the satirical poem Today by Jean Little and the reunion of Roberta and her father in The Railway Children. The latter, and the wistful The Girl Whom the Wind Loved by Alison Uttley, read by Eleanor T, were the pieces that moved the audience.
The Senior choices were as varied. Freya H, playing to her strengths, chose two hilarious pieces - Roald Dahl's The BFG and I Saw a Jolly Hunter by Charles Causley. Edward H went for vigorous action with an excerpt from Sun of York by Ronald Welch and Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, which he read with great spirit. Poppy M's highlight was the highly amusing but somewhat disconcerting poem Attention Seeking by Jackie Kay, while Toby S made us pause and think with his rendering of Barrie Wade's short but telling poem Truth. Having touched our hearts with her prose - the conclusion of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince - Nancy J moved us with a performance of W.B.Yeats's wonderfully atmospheric The Wild Swans at Coole. This last, a poem about the passing of time and the persistence of love, was a real challenge, but Nancy's reading was marvellously controlled and beautifully modulated, and she held us spellbound.
Some people are natural performers, but most of us have our anxious moments when we stand up in front of a large audience. Perhaps the greatest virtue of the reading competition is that it makes children confront their anxieties and rise above them, so that they find that they can indeed use their voices to communicate effectively and can gain enjoyment from doing so. This year there were some sixty entrants for the competition and I like to think that those who did not make it to the last stage benefited from the experience. It was pleasing to me that there was as much enthusiasm for the competition this year as there ever has been.
As well as gifted readers and an appreciative audience, a spoken word competition needs skilful and sympathetic adjudication. We have been fortunate over the years that the Heads of English, and on occasions the Headmasters, of senior schools have been prepared to give up their time to officiate for us. It makes a great difference to have an authoritative adjudicator from outside the school, and we were very grateful to have with us this year Mr Ian McClary, Head of English at Repton, and his Sixth Form assistant, Becky. We enjoyed their brief comments on each performance and also benefited from some very useful advice on the art of reading to an audience. We thank them both.
Thirty-five years is a long period for a single individual to oversee an activity in a school, but I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every one of the more than two thousand readings I have heard during this time. Some have been truly outstanding performances; others have been more modest; all in their different ways have been 'personal bests', and I have enjoyed them as such. My thanks to all the children who have read and to all the colleagues and adjudicators who have helped over the years.
Junior Finalists: Charlie L, Ella N, Eleanor T, Nicholas T, Gabriella T
Junior Winner: Ella N Junior Runner Up: Gabriella T
Senior Finalists: Freya H, Edward H, Nancy J, Poppy M, Toby S
Senior Winner (Hine Reading Cup): Nancy J Runner Up: Edward H
HGKP
Posted on
Tue, March 10, 2009
by S. Anselm's