Sakura - Making the most of spring blossom with some creative writing!

Sakura, Sakura!

Creative writing workshop, KS2

Children inspiring their writing with a trip to the school garden!

Spring has well and truly sprung! Old news for most in the Northern Hemisphere, I know, but as the cherry tree at the end of my garden has now exploded into a cloud of pink blossom, the beautiful growing season is hard to miss.

This natural inspiration is priceless and, following on from a workshop about iconic Japanese print The Great Wave, provides the perfect backdrop for some writing on the Japanese Hanami cherry blossom (sakura) festival.

Using a selection of Hiroshige and Hokusai woodblock prints as inspiration, my group spent the morning outside in the school garden getting up close and blossomy with the pink blooms. Following their senses, the children developed a vocabulary bank featuring precise verbs (floating, dancing, waving, gliding and so on) and evocative adjectives (silky, glossy, transparent, baby pink, sweet aroma and many more).

This was great fun and, as the blossom tree is in the middle of the playground, this is a wonderful way of introducing children to their surroundings in a new way. This could be a great link to your Forest School or outdoor classroom.

We even used the vocabulary to write some short Haiku poems. Here are a few great examples...

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...

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

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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 ...

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