Enriching Experiences

The Story Barn - Exploring the Works of William Shakespeare

Year 6 visited 'The Story Barn' at Calderstones Park to enhance their understanding of various plays written by William Shakespeare. We explored Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream: drawing out the key scenes, understanding the language used, acting them out and using it to inspire writing tasks. 

"I really enjoyed acting out the different scenes of Macbeth in front of the Allerton Oak. The weather made the witches scene come to life. It is something I won't ever forget!" Success J

Inspiring Poets - Zoom Call with Tomos Roberts

As part of our World Book Day celebrations, we had a Zoom call with Tomos Roberts - 'Tomfoolery' - who used lockdown as an opportunity to create art through his words. We loved hearing about his top tips for writing and where we finds his inspiration. Full of inspiration and motivated to write, we created our own poems in a similar style.

English Outside the Classroom

As part of our analysis of our wordless picture book, 'The Arrival', we created six freeze frames to portray our own story of escaping our home.  We imagined how the protagonist must have felt on his venture away from the safety and security of his home, only to arrive in a place that was completely alien to him.  We enjoyed breaking the freeze frame to act in the shoes of our characters and justify the way they were feeling at significant points throughout the story.

"The drama really helped me empathise with the characters in the book.  I enjoyed using the space to think of different backdrops for my freeze frames and using the props and furniture to tell the story." Jacob S

"By creating the freeze frames it really helped me to think about how the characters might be feeling. I liked using facial expressions, props and zooming in with the camera to capture the character's emotions.  Doing this activity helped me to properly think about how immigrants feel when they enter our country and cannot speak our language. I think everyone should think about how we treat these people as sometimes they could be escaping terrible things happening in their home like the character in the book." Harry M

Writing in the Community

We wrote Christmas cards to spread some festive cheer to our neighbours at Walton Manor.  We loved seeing the impact that our writing has on the community.

"I really loved writing the Christmas cards for the people at Walton Manor. When they opened their cards, the residents were really happy and it was great to see how my writing impacted their lives." Ava

'World Book Day' Celebrations: The Power of Words!

To continue Year 6's exploration of the completely wordless picture book 'The Arrival', pupils were challenged to use poetry to bring the main character's emotions to life.

Pupils stepped into the shoes of the protagonist and wrote a sonnet to his wife and child, describing his sadness at leaving them behind and longing for them to meet again one day. 

"I like writing songs, so it was fun to be creative when we wrote our poems. Because we already looked at the picture book and had built up a bank of powerful vocabulary, I could use this in my poem too. I'm really proud of the poem I created." Frankie

We Are Writers!

In the lead up to our World Book Day Celebrations, every child in the school writes their own 100 word (Lower School) or 200 word (Upper School) story about a topic of their choice. The pupils choose their own style of narrative: sci-fi, adventure, mystery, fantasy: the list goes on... and compose their own narrative being mindful of how to tell a full story in a precise way.  After polishing and a few tweaks, these stories are collated and published into a school book, which each child receives on World Book Day.

You can find our books in our school library as well as our local one too: Spellow Library.  At Spellow Library, we are the featured authors on display and have performed our stories for the local community to celebrate our fantastic writing.

"I think it's a great idea to have our writing published into a book. Not many people can say that their writing can be read by lots of people so I'm very lucky. I love sharing my story and my friends' stories with my little sister." Sabella