A double-barrelled Early Harvest update

This year, Year 5 and 6 students from eight primary schools - Kingsville, St Gerard's, Newport Lakes, Spotswood, Riddells Creek, St Albans Meadows, Balwyn North and St Monica’s - are writing and editing our thirteenth Early Harvest book! As term two draws to a close, students’ stories are well underway and our young editors are getting fired up is getting into gear, so we thought it high time to give you an update.

Choosing the theme

Every Early Harvest book has a theme - one big idea that will fuel the imaginations of more than 500 young story authors across Melbourne! The theme hunt began with a “longlist” of nearly one hundred suggestions from our partner schools. After a bit of weeding to remove themes which were too broad or too similar to previous years, 35 amazing students representing those schools attended our theme workshop to make this super important decision.

Ultimately, the group was deadlocked between two choices, so they had a really positive discussion about what to do - and for the first time since 2013, the students decided to combine the top two ideas into a double theme:

Betrayal & Survival

We're very excited to explore this dual theme with our young authors and editors this year. Stay tuned for more info on how the book evolves!

The Editorial Committee

The Editorial Committee have been meeting each week since Saturday, 11 May - and they’ve already made some important decisions!

The 2024 Editorial Committee act out their favourite animals for their first end-of-meeting photo.

At their first meeting, our brand new team of young editors each chose a name that fits our double-barrelled Betrayal & Survival theme. Here’s a few highlights from the cast of characters:

Deceptive Amy, Trickster Ayla, Double-crosser Shrey, Brave Backstabber Reyansh, Sneaky Clem, Twisted Tilly, Scheming Francis and Resourceful Winter.

Since then, the editors have also decided on a title for the book, an illustrator for the cover, and even made some progress towards making the super difficult decision of who will be our guest author! (Watch this space for those announcements very soon.)

They’re now working on a subtitle, their editorial and a plan for the activities and features that will accompany the stories in the book. In between all this super important work, they’ve been filling their breaks with equally important activities like a pet show, a scavenger hunt and games like Two Truths and a Lie.

Here are some of the things the editors have said about their experience so far:

What's one thing you learned from this session?
How fun the people in this group are - Shelby

What are you proud of having done today?
I am proud of coming up with some creative ideas for the book cover - Georgia
I am proud of starting to make a lot of progress making the book - Beatrix

What was your favourite part of today's session?
The scavenger hunt and picking the guest author - Matilda
Deciding on a book title and meeting everyone’s pets in the snack break - Georgia

100 Story Building’s expert facilitators, led this year by Jules Coscolluela, are thrilled to support the editors in more awesome creative decision-making over their 11 week journey!

Can you survive the betrayal that’s to come?

We’ll share more news from our young editors in the near future; and if you’re a time traveller, you can jump right to the next update now.

If you’d like to find out more about Early Harvest and all our programs and workshops, sign up to our Enews to get informed every couple of months or so! (You’ll find a link at the bottom of the page.)