Why is ARTiculate's new e-bulletin like a pygmy, crocodile plumber?

This week, ARTiculate is launching a weekly-ish bulletin from ARTiculate Education where I aim to push great ideas for creative literacy your way.

Like a pygmy, crocodile plumber, the bulletin will be short, snappy and useful. I will point you towards books that are perfect for you and the classes you teach, some helpful planning ideas, videos, examples of work, details of new workshops I offer and so on that might give you great ideas for teaching effective, creative literacy. Heck, I might even chuck in the odd cat picture.

If you teach primary school aged children already, are a student working in education or if you were cleaning the tables and signed up for this by accident, there will almost certainly be something in this for you to use now or in the future.

To sign up, click here and send a blank email - I'll add you to the list.

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...

PhD reading: popular-culture in children's writing, agentive learning and going bonkers to Pee-wee Herman

A bit of a backlog of reading to summarise, but here I will look at the following..... From Superman to singing the blues: on the trail of child writing and popular culture by Anne Haas Dyson (2018) This isn’t my real writing: the fate of children’s agency in a too-tight curriculum by Anne Haas Dyson (2020) Going bonkers! by Henry Jenkins (1988) A summary in ten words: The agency of children determines the agency of children. Word of the week: agentive Fretting hours to working hours ratio: 2:1 One of the aspects of writing I am most interested in is composition. When I was a primary school teacher, I didn’t fully appreciate the difference between writing a story, say, and composing a text. The latter being much more closely aligned with children’s identities than acquiring the technical skills of writing. Part of my thinking work on my PhD is about unpicking this concept in both digital and material contexts and, in doing so, considering the relationship between ...

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...

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