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exploring writing     creating writing     extension activity

Exploring Writing   with Patricia Grace

Patricia grew up reading stories from Britain, but she now makes a career of writing stories that are uniquely New Zealand in language and images. She worked for 20 years as a teacher, managing to write short stories in between marking schoolwork and raising a family. Her 1975 book Waiariki was the first collection of stories to be published by a Māori woman. Her works have been translated into a number of different languages and distributed throughout the world. Patricia lives and works from her home on tribal land at Hongoeka Bay in Plimmerton.

I think every experience is valid, whether it's good or bad. Everything that surrounds you and all the ordinary things - they're material to base writing on.
Patricia Grace

The Creative Explorer writing activity provides students with a chance to write, edit, and illustrate their own stories. We have used Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa's book The Kuia and the Spider (Longman Paul, Auckland, 1981) as a starting point for students to write their stories. For those students with heaps of their own ideas, there is also space for writing and arranging their own text, printing it out, and illustrating it.

Explore the features of the Drama screen by moving your mouse over the various parts of the images below.

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