Communicating with colour - Writing and art workshop week 1

Week 1: Authors communicate through words - artists communicate through colours.

I feel very fortunate this week after launching a six week partnership with a Leeds primary school. Working with twelve of Year 4's finest, we will be exploring the creative processes of authors and artists using as a stimulus, The Island by Armin Greder.

The book's beautiful but haunting pictures provide the perfect context for discussing how illustrators use colour to develop and change the mood of a text.

Children discussed the emotions associated with primary and secondary colours and were surprised to discover they have both negative and positive connotations.

Using Rothko's colour panels as a guide, the first group developed 'mood boards' using warm and cool colours. I was impressed with how they could discuss the significance of the colours they had chosen.

Year 4's Rothko-esque colour mood boards

The second group went further and used colours to indicate the changing mood of the characters as the story progressed. It was incredible to hear them using these simple but effective guides to narrate a complex tale.

Coloured stripes indicate mood changes in the story. The thickness of a stripe varies by the intensity of the emotion.

Looking forward to next week's session.

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

The Dragon Boat's afloat! Art with Year 1

This half term I have been teaching art with Year 1. Far from just being an art project, this work has shown how vital DT in helping children apply what they have learned in core subjects. For this art project, our topic has been the Chinese Dragon Boat festival, celebrated by Chinese communities around the world in early summer. We even had one here in Leeds! Our challenge has been to create a dragon boat that will float on water. The children drew and painted 3D dragon heads to attach to the scaly bodies that will make the floating part of the boat. The trickiest part was attaching the corks to the inside that would help the boats float on water. It took a lot of trial and error using a water tray to get it just right. The children did a fantastic job and have really enjoyed it. It just goes to show how vital art and DT are to children's learning - not only do they draw in creative aspects of learning, completing a project like this requires knowledge of science, math

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