Explainer video #2 - Helping children make sense of Shakespeare

To celebrate the date of Shakespeare's birth and death on 23rd April, we are sharing some tips from our book to help teachers get to grips with Shakespeare in the primary classroom.

In this video, Stefan explains how to read Shakespeare with primary school children.

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

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...

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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