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...

A few weeks ago, the Twitter algorithm fairy threw a discussion about creativity into my feed. I have a natural aversion to putting my hand into this kind of hornets' nest, but on this occasion I couldn't resist. The discussion that was playing out reflects the evidence that creativity is something teachers care about and see it as a skill to be valued in education, and yet it is still something misunderstood and misappropriated. It went something like this... A primary school teacher had posted to Twitter a picture of an art display in her classroom. See a snippet of the picture below. The display showed pictures of birds the children had painted in watercolours and was captioned with a comment to praise her class for their work. Not so, said Twitter. The birds are all identical: how is this going to develop creativity in children? Wrong, came the counter-argument: children in primary school need to be fluent in skills before they can attempt to be creative. ...

Teachers are terrible for butting in, don't you think? If you're a teacher, or if there's a teacher in your family, you'll know what I mean here. In my local Headingley cafe, I am always wildlife watching for parent-teacher hybrids with their talk of 'making good choices' and loud interruptions to children's chatter with choice dollops of wisdom. I am just as culpable. Taking my nephew to the park, the teacher that lurks within me spots the opportunity for quick lesson on plant life or bird migration. Cue deep sighs and athletic eye-rolls from my nephew. Reading a book with him is too tempting to pass up an impromptu phonics lesson or when playing computer battle simulations together on Rome Total War , I can't help myself from giving him a little lesson on the Roman Empire as I pulverise his centurions with my Egyptian chariots. The inner teacher bursts out, hulk-like, from your unsuspecting human form. As a teacher of writing, I have become more...

Being an author is not just about writing a story - it is about telling a story. I often tell the children I work with that they are like magicians or puppet masters: they can cast the spell or pull the strings of the reader. How they navigate the reader through the story is in their hands. Over the last few weeks I have been working with a group of children at Valley View Primary School on a topic exploring immigration and the voice of both migrants and those who receive them. The work is based on The Island by Armin Greder, a tale of a man washed ashore and the community who decide what to do with him. The key stylistic element I have taught these children is the skill in which they manipulate the reader. Whether it is dropping subtle hints as to what will happen later or using the weather to signal the worsening mood of a story (e.g. the sky getting darker, the rain getting heavier), these tools go a long way to developing the children's voice as authors. Coupled with ...

How do you craft a story for an audience? How can you encourage children to begin to think of themselves as authors rather than children in a literacy lesson? Key questions for teaching creative writing in primary schools and this week I discussed these ideas with a group of Year 5 children as we wrote the openings to our Star Wars stories. The children agreed that a quick pace was important to writing and adventure story. Short sentences, using powerful verbs, limited descriptions - all things that help absorb the reader in a whirlwind of action. What was trickier was knowing how to 'craft' the story for a reader who hasn't seen the planning process. How do we reveal just enough about a character, a place, a quest etc to root the reader in the story but keep them interested by what is NOT said? I call these 'suggestives' - how you suggest something to a reader without telling them. The origin of reading for inference that is taught in KS2, it is essential...