This week, I have been reading...   Researching prior learning: How toddlers study movies by Carey Bazalgette (2018) Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive third spaces of youth media production by Parry, Howard and Penfold (2020) Video games design and aesthetic by James Gee (2016) A summary in ten words: Disrupting the traditional teacher-learner power balance makes for interesting results. Word of the week: Bazalgette (now I realise how you pronounce it). Caffeinated sips to words-read ratio: 3:1   The theme of this set of reading is children’s engagement with digital media outside of the classroom. Bazalgette challenges the assumptions about how toddlers watch and understand films through informal viewing; Parry and others consider the creation of text-based video games by young people outside of a formal educational setting. One key idea that links these articles relates to the positionality of the learner in relation to traditional ‘authority’ in...

 This week, I have been reading... Digital games and libraries , James Gee (2012) Emergent digital authoring: playful tinkering with mode, media and technology , Becky Parry and Lucy Taylor (2021) An interview with Gunther Kress , Eve Bearne (2005) Makerspaces in early childhood education: principles of pedagogy and practice , Jackie Marsh at al (2019) Quite an eclectic list of reading for this week. I intend to adopt a more systematic approach to reading but, for now, I am happy to keep an open mind and read through things that have been in my #toread folder for a while. A summary in ten words: Playing with digital technology invites rich social interaction and learning. Word of the week: tinkering  How much I understood: 65% (Gunther Kress dragged down my average) *** Quite an eclectic list of reading for this week. I intend to adopt a more systematic approach to reading but, for now, I am happy to keep an open mind and read through things that have been in my #tore...

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.  

Writing a book is hard work... but worth it! What began as a retirement project for my mom, Maureen (yes, we say 'mom' in Wolverhampton) ended up as a self-published book of 44 pages in 2017, and is now on its way to become a 250 word pager with a proper publisher. Like I said, worth it. So, over four years of writing, writing, rewriting and more writing, this is what we learnt. Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage by Stefan Kucharczyk and Maureen Kucharczyk (David Fulton publishers) is due for release on 28 September 2021. 1.          Shakespeare is really good. Shakespeare loved language and he used it to retell classic, timeless stories that his audience knew and loved. The difference? His versions are definitive – they have not endured for 400 years by accident. 2.           Empathy. Shakespeare deals with the big stuff: life, love, death and all the rest of it. His characters are heroes, villai...

I'm delighted to share that our new book, Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage (David Fulton publishers) is due out in September 2021. The book, written together with Maureen Kucharczyk, is an essential guide for battling the Bard with primary school learners. First a confession: we are not Shakespeare scholars, nor do we have a background in the dramatic arts. Instead, we are teachers with a love for Shakespeare. Yet we both felt that a suitable, beginners guide to teaching Shakespeare with primary children didn't exist. So we set out to write the book that we wished we had been given at the start of our teaching careers. Yes, we've both overcome bad memories of learning Shakespeare at school. That is why we adopt a creative, flexible and child-centred approach to teaching Shakespeare. If you've always wanted to give Shakespeare a go but don't know where to start, this is the book for you. Here's a quick summary of what's in...

Drama is an integral component of primary English teaching. It is the engine that drives creative responses to stories, helping children explore characters, settings and predicaments. Yet the primary National Curriculum for England (DfE, 2013) makes scant reference to drama. Some generic guidance indicates the importance of speaking, listening and performing although these points are both too obvious and too generalised to be useful to teachers and subject coordinators hoping to embed drama across the whole school. When writing our forthcoming book, Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage (Routledge, David Fulton, 2021), both Maureen and I felt that whole-school drama guidance for primary teachers - so integral to teaching Shakespeare's plays - was notably lacking from online resources currently available (apologies if you have produced such a document but we could not find it!). We decided to compile our own. In fact, you may have found this blog post...