Creative literacy workshop a success!

Hip hip hooray! The latest ARTiculate workshop running in school was a resounding success. The six Year 4 children made leaps and bounds forward in not only their creative techniques but also their attitude to writing. It was a pleasure to watch them explore deeper and deeper the mysterious island in Armin Greder's fantastic short story. They became absorbed in the roles of the islanders and the man, exploring their motivations, hopes and their fears.

All children made at least one sub-level progress during the workshop. One incredible girl (EAL, BME) made TWO sub-levels progress, from a 2C to a 2A in this time. An incredible achievement!

The outcome
The children produced a fantastic piece of writing. Going through the creative processes, they:

developed vocabulary banks
orally rehearsed their ideas
wrote an initial draft of their piece
reshaped and edited their work
evaluated it against level-appropriate checklists
wrote their writing for presentation

Exploring artwork was also an integral factor in shaping our understand of the text. In this workshop, the children:

practised using pastels
mixed colours and studied the relationships between them
developed seascapes using mood-appropriate colours
drew themselves as an islander
understood how an author and illustrator work together

See our gallery for more images of artwork and writing from this workshop!

Progression in primary drama - going beyond the National Curriculum

Drama is an integral component of primary English teaching. It is the engine that drives creative responses to stories, helping children explore characters, settings and predicaments. Yet the primary National Curriculum for England (DfE, 2013) makes scant reference to drama. Some generic guidance indicates the importance of speaking, listening and performing although these points are both too obvious and too generalised to be useful to teachers and subject coordinators hoping to embed drama across the whole school. When writing our forthcoming book, Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage (Routledge, David Fulton, 2021), both Maureen and I felt that whole-school drama guidance for primary teachers - so integral to teaching Shakespeare's plays - was notably lacking from online resources currently available (apologies if you have produced such a document but we could not find it!). We decided to compile our own. In fact, you may have found this blog post

Filthy wretch or poor thing? Rethinking the Island, KS2, Week 1

A treat for the final half term - a new workshop at a delightful school in Leeds! This half term I am working with two Year 5 teachers to develop a cross-year group, cross-curricular writing project based on my favourite picture book, Armin Greder's The Island . I've done this book many times and every time the response is different! This week, we got to grips with the facts, possibilities and mysteries of the story. What do we know about the story so far? (we only ever read up to page 6 to leave it on a knife edge...) What doesn't this story tell us and what could we infer or predict? We looked at the crowd of islanders who 'welcome' the stranger's arrival. As in every class, country or community, no group ever sees the world the same way and we discussed how the islanders might react differently to the man. Is he a poor thing who needs to be rescued? Is he a curiosity? Is he a threat? We each adopted an islander and took on their perspective f

What does storytelling software Twine have to offer young writers?

A fter a chance bit of Googling this week, I stumbled across Twine - an interactive storytelling platform for building text-based games. It is a platform with pot ential for developing narrative in our schools . ⌚ 6 minutes I have spent my summer reading. After spending lockdown in Thailand with a rapidly deleting selection of books (reading A Casual Vacancy was a last resort), coming back to a house of full bookshelves was a treat. It felt good for the soul to escape the worries of the present by slipping into another, fictional world whose problems were not my concern. I have also been playing a lot of computer games, revisiting many of the games that I enjoyed as a child: The Settlers , Civilisation , Frontier Elite , Rome Total War . If you're not a 1990s computer game fan then, no, you're not alone but please indulge me as I reminisce. This summer, with time on my hands, I started to think seriously about why it was I enjoy playing these games, and why they seem to

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