You Little Beauty! Fantastic FREE taster workshop in Leeds today!

This workshop was an excellent introduction to empathy in children's literature and a great way for children to explore the skills and processes used by real author-illustrators.

What a great way to end the week! Spending some creative time with some Year 4 children at their school in Leeds today!

Today, we got our teeth into the curious tale of Little Beauty by Anthony Browne. Not all is as it seems at this 'special' zoo - home to one lonely but talented primate. With a comfortable arm chair, flat screen TV and with tea and burgers on-demand, this gorilla might seem to have it all. But the one thing he is missing is a true friend. Enchanting!

A brilliant charcoal drawing of gorilla with a very effective painted background!

Comparing the lifestyle, diet and habitat of this special gorilla with the REAL mountain gorillas of Central Africa, the children produced some excellent writing. They even turned their hand to some mixed media artwork to give our gorilla a bit of colour in his new found happiness.

Thanks to the children and the school for a fantastic hardworking morning.

This workshop was an excellent introduction to empathy in children's literature and a great way for children to explore the skills and processes used by real author-illustrators.

To win a free taster workshop for your primary school, click the link here! Closes 1 June 2015. Leeds primary schools only (sorry folks!)

A superb piece of writing by a Year 4 child comparing real Mountain gorillas with Anthony Browne's creation.

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...

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...

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 se...

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