Primary School Creative Writing Project

In 2007 I was invited by Creative Partnerships to lead a creative project at a village school in Leicestershire as part of a county-wide project involving several schools. The project was with the whole school of 57 children and there was an element of training for the teachers during the process.

The focus was mostly on supporting creative writing through music, and ran over several weeks culminating in sharing the work within the school. The school was divided into 3 classes – reception, years 1 and 2, and the juniors – and I worked with them all equally.

I also ran an after-school music session for all the staff so we could get to know each other, have a go on instruments and discuss what we’d do.

During this project I offered many different types of stimuli to support development of literacy skills – such as overhead projectors, typewriters, suede fabric and chalk, musical instruments, using cameras, old maps, magnifying glasses, small recycled resources, ‘backwards’ writing kit, stethoscopes, speaking hoses and anything else along the way which I thought would help.

These two films are the culmination of the project in the reception class and year 1 and 2 who both came up with stories.

Reception’s class story was developed when children were offered different kinds of materials including a den in their class lit by an overhead projector. They made this scary story. All the words are their own, the sounds were created and performed by them and the images were made by using black sugar-paper on the OHP…

Year 1 and 2’s story was inspired by a discovery. Children were given cameras and asked to take photos outside. One of the children found a very interesting moth which was great for me as I’m into moths! We identified it as a Scorched Wing moth and during the ensuing sessions the story was created using many different materials including an overhead projector. The story is narrated by the children themselves using their own words…