Retired schoolteacher Adrian Pryde is offering schools and parents free workbooks that he guarantees will improve any child’s written language ability.

Mr Pryde spent 32 years teaching at Orange Public School, during which time he wrote and published his own series of written language workbooks, Tried and Sentenced, aimed at primary aged children.

“A lot of other textbooks were pretty boring and pretty stale and the format was a bit removed from what the pupils wanted to do,” said Mr Pryde.

“I put together this series of written language books to help develop students written language skills, this includes sentence construction, punctuation grammar, different styles of writing, writing for emotion, adventure, excitement — all those different language techniques that good writers use.”

The self-published series was quite successful at the time, but Mr Pryde said he still has between 1000-2000 copies stored away in a container that he would like to see get put to use.

“I still have all these copies left and I'd rather give them all away than pulp them and recycle them. I'm sure there is some benefit there,” he said.

“And with this COVID-19 crisis going on, there are parents out there who, like me, are not really cluey on computer skills and if they want to they can take these books home and work through them together as a family.”

Mr Pryce already donated copies to local schools but is happy for parents to contact him on 0459025084 if they would like the workbooks.