I recently held a workshop about character design and creative writing for Standard 5 & 6 students of Hummingbird Elementary School in Belize City. The students are reading my book, The Land of the Night Sun, in their Reading & Comprehension class, and the school asked me to hold a workshop where the students could design their character to fit into the story.

Needless to say, it was a blast seeing what their imaginations came up with. We also held a couple of group activities, one being the “Character Hot Seat”, where a student pretended to be their characters while being asked questions from their classmates. They also went around examining each other’s drawings and tried to guess something about a classmate’s characters solely based from visual clues. I participated myself with my own character, Hap Hap the cowardly potoo (pictured below), and read a short scene featuring his encounter with the protagonist, Itzel.