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.  

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 why Shakespeare should be part of your primary school curriculum.    

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...

    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...

Hello! 你好!    My name is Stefan Kucharczyk and I am an experienced primary school teacher, lecturer and writer based in Leeds (UK). I have always loved losing myself in stories: in books, films, computer games, theatre, lego and anything and everything else. But my real passion has always been writing. Now, I work with primary school children and teachers to support them in making writing an immersive, creative and fun experience. I am interested in the potential of creative, enquiry-based learning to change the way we think about education in primary schools (and education in general) and to help prepare young learners to live and flourish as literate citizens in an exciting world. I also work in Higher Education as a university lecturer and tutor. No, I am not an all-seeing expert with schemes of work under my arm, but I have experience, passion, imagination and the willingness to take a risk - all that you need to change the world. To book me for workshops, CPD, speaking ...

Is your classroom a creative place? If you are a teacher pondering this question, the answer you give will depend on how you understand the term 'creativity'. It might also give an idea about how much you value creativity as a skill for learning and how much of it goes on in your lessons.  Defining creativity can be a challenge because how we understand the term is often tied up with how we feel about ourselves as a creative being. It can be quite personal. For some people, the idea of being creative is about art or dance because this seems like when people are at their most imaginative. If you can't draw, that line of thinking goes, then you're not creative. For others, creativity is about being a free spirit, breaking free of the rules. These are both misleading and it is the persistence of these myths that has helped many people decide that they are not a 'creative type'. That only certain people can be creative is yet another myth.  The t...

  Last month, I submitted my Masters by Research thesis at Leeds Beckett University. My topic was teacher identity and creativity and on Tuesday, I was delighted to be invited to speak on it at the University of the Western Cape. It was lovely to meet the staff from the Faculty of Education and I thank them for going easy on me with the questions! It was my first academic talk and I am glad it was in my home-from-home of Cape Town. I'll spare you the full 15,000 words, but the research was into my identity as a teacher and how growing accountability is reshaping not only the role of teachers but also how they see themselves as trusted professionals. Although this autoethnographic research was into my own story as a teacher, exploring the experiences of others is something I am following up through my Facebook blog Teacher Talking Time .  The key aspect of this research was in the area of creativity in primary education. If the process of learning and wor...

Hello teachers! Happy half term to you all. You’re nearly over the line! As you roll into that post-SATs-practising-sports-day-empty-out-your-trays time of year, there is no better time to experiment. With that in mind, take your class for a magical browse in Ross MacKenzie’s brilliant The Nowhere Emporium , a place of secrets and wonders. Ideal for free-flowing creative writing for all of Key Stage 2 and the perfect starting point for some exciting art and drama. Scroll down for details on how to use The Nowhere Emporium with your class. Harris Burdick: the case file Last month, as part of a CPD course for primary leaders, I lead a workshop on creative writing that explored Chris Van Allsburg’s intriguing picture book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick . After discovering a mysterious letter by Chris Van Allsburg, teachers were asked to write part of a story linked to the Harris Burdick illustrations. Their writing has been passed onto the relevant authorities and has been ...

Hello teachers! With the number of ‘awareness’ days slightly overwhelming the calendar, it is most certainly forgivable if you’ve blanked them all out. May is full of them, by the way. While National Handwashing Day and International Dawn Chorus Day (5th and 7th of May respectively, if you have your diary to hand) might not get your pulse racing, one awareness worth being aware of is National Share a Story Month which runs throughout May. So, if you are looking for a perfect sharing-book to celebrate, look no further than The Willow Pattern Story by Allan Drummond, a beautiful take on the story of the famous Chinese pottery design. It is ideal for reading together, alone or using it for your literacy lessons. Scroll down for details on how to use The Willow Pattern Story to set your literacy lessons aflutter. Greater Depth in writing CPD – Pudsey schools away day – April 2018 I was delighted to be invited to present at the Pudsey Family of Schools away day last week. It was an opp...

Ok, I know we are only half way through filming but I couldn’t resist making a quick poster for the movie! A lot of the work I do involves children filming or publishing their work. I think a fundamental part of developing children as authors or artists with a genuine sense of voice is that they get to see their work promoted, shared and celebrated. If you’re making a film for a real audience, then it needs to be promoted as a real movie. I wonder how much of a perception shift the impact of this has?  When you explain to a group of children that you are going to publish a book or make a film, one of the greatest challenges is convincing the children that you mean it – that their work really will get shared even if it is just locally in the school. This, I suppose, offers an insight into how they view their education. From past experiences, getting children to see themselves as authors requires an injection of confidence and when they see their work being shared publicly, ...

The film project got off to a flying start with the children at a primary school in Cape Town this afternoon. It was wonderful to be invited to work on this research project into migrant children’s perspectives on inclusion in schools. Last week, the lead researcher discussed inclusion with a group of six children from Grade 4 – a mixture of migrant and local children. To make this topic accessible, the researcher had used The Arrival by Shaun Tan: a wonderful picture book that follows the journey of a man and his family who leave their home to build a life in a new country; the story explores the challenges and surprises that await them. The book has no words and the fantastic illustrations make the book part graphic novel, part photograph album. Last week, the lead researcher worked with the children to take their own photographs around school to enable the children to identify things that showed that the school was including them (or not) in the life of the school. ...