VOICES ACROSS THE PACIFIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 18

VOICES ACROSS THE PACIFIC

Children Record for U.S. Programme

DUCATIONISTS in America are interested in the way New Zealand school children spend their days. This was emphasised when, as a result of a talk about New Zealand broadcast in Detroit by a recent visitor, officials! of Station WDTR, the educational radio station of the Detroit public schools, wrote to the authorities in New Zealand asking for a short programme in which

Auckland school children could talk about their school life to children in the United States. The officials said they were specially interested in the organisation of our schools, and the Auckland Headmasters’ Association immediately got in toych with Jean Combs, Officer in Charge of Broadcasts to Schools for the NZBS. By selecting seven ordinary children from different Auckland schools she was able to make up a bright six-minute programme, which has been recorded and will soon be sent to Detroit. In return Miss Combs hopeg to get a similar programme that can be used in NZBS School Broadcasts and this small beginning may lead to further exchanges of actuality broadcasts made by children of other lands. With suitable preliminary work by teachers, these broadcasts could prove of considerable value in the social studies side of the syllabus. The Detroit programme may also be sent to Norway, where English is taught in schools from an early age.

| Although it is only six minutes long, the amount of preparation involved in ‘the Detroit schools programme was made greater by the need to get an effect of spontaneity in. the children’s discussion-without any of the embarrassed pauses, unfinished sentences, and irrelevancies likely to intrude into a recording made by children standing before a microphone for the first time in their lives’ Miss Combs adopted a method used in BBC programmes like

To Start You Talking, in which 15 to 18 year-olds belonging to British Youth Clubs discussed their club life. First of all a preliminary discussion was held at which a shorthand expert took down everything the children said. The notes were re-arranged so as to make a continuous narrative, presetving at the same time the children’s original freshness of phrase; scripts were typed out, and the youngsters then read them through several times at rehearsals before the final recording was made, An introductory narrative spoken by an adult gave some of the more interesting geographical facts about Auckland-its position on the map, industries, social life, educational set-up, and so on-and to conclude the programme a children’s . studio class sang Alec Rowley’s ‘arrangement of the carol "A Child This Day is Born." Of the seven children who spoke the main part of the programme, Carol, Barbara and Ian, came from Cornwall Park primary school, Bruce and Margaret’ came from Edendale School, near Mt. Albert (a "decapitated" primary school with no Form One and Two), Chris came from Kowhai Intermediate school, and Brian from Takapuna Grammar, a coeducational post-primary school. Not Copybook English The prose style of this more or less experimental programme is not exactly copybook English, but ig as near as can be got for broadcasting purposes to the natural, ungrammatical, yet fascinating playground conversation of young children. Below is what Bruce says in the programme. His remarks may appear to give American children a rather romantic idea of the area he lives in, but to the child himself what he talks about in the programme afe the most important things in his immediate environment. Bruce says: "I go to Edendale School and I’m I0 and next year I'll be leaving as our school only goes up to Standard Four. You start at Primer One usually at five and when you're in Standard Four the children are usually about 10 or 11. I live at Mt. Albert, where there used to be a volcano, but now it’s dead. In the middle of it where the volcano used to be is left a big hole and that’s a football field now and there’s a track round the edge of it about six or seven feet wide. After school the boys where I live-there are about six of us-we go up to the mountain and we have races round there or we play football on the field and we go bird-nesting. There are a lot of trees on the mountain. I like dramatic work very much, That’s one of my hobbies and also I like stamp-collecting."