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...

Macbeth Creative writing workshop, KS2 Macbeth is a blood-drenched, gory and spooky tale. To o gruesome for little ones? Apparently not! The Year 4 and 5 children I have been working with this half term have become completely immersed in the Scott ish play.  As well as getting the children to write short playscripts, developing the climactic s howdown between Macbeth and Macduff (more on this at a later date), my groups ha ve designed some concept posters for the play. The children chose a colou r and symbol that represented some aspect of the play (bloody red, royal purple, a black cat for the wi tches, a chess p iece for the king) and overlayed it with words that help tell the story. We used emulsion paint and big worn-out brushes (the ones at the back of the cu pboard that nobody uses...) to achieve a battle-worn, scratchy effect. Gory blood sp latters w ent dow n a treat to o! Here are some fine examples! Royal Shakespeare Company, take note! ...

These excellent drawings were completed in our final workshop today. Some of these snapshot images are aspects of the book's main illustrations whilst some are taken from various doodles that are scattered throughout the pages. Using black ink, detail was added using the different shading techniques we have practised. Colour was applied later using watered acrylics. The children demonstrated not only their progress as artists but also their confidence in selecting shading patterns. Great work!

Lessons on vocabulary gave us a clutch of exciting new words to try out; the drama let us explore the man's inner thoughts; the art work had given us a mood to recreate.  It can take time to immerse children in another world, but it is certainly worth the wait!  First draft! Week 4 After three workshops worth of discussing, acting, playing around with language, making notes, analysing and discussing how in fact you might catch a seagull to eat it*, we were ready to pour out ideas onto paper in a first draft. Analysing a text had given the group a five paragraph structure that they were going to follow to explain t hese mysteries, unanswered by Armin Greder's sparse text: Where the mystery man had come from? How did he come upon the raft? What were his first impressions of the peculiar island? Who are the strange and wild inhabitants of the island? What might the future might hold for the man. The narrative would be in the first person: the children retell...