Today I was lucky to lead a workshop for other teachers showing how to use children's creativity to inspire writing.  It was a great success and I was really happy with all the positive feedback I was given.  Such a great feeling to know you are helping others in their teaching practise.

I decided to add some reflection time once the books were on the children's blog.  It was nice to see the children stop and think about the whole project.  But it did make me realise they weren't as aware about the whole process as I would have liked.  So my aim for my next create first project is to co-construct it with the children so they know the end point.  I wonder that by having clearer criteria, the children will have more thoughtful reflections.  

The children really enjoyed sharing their stories, reading other children's and giving feedback.  They like using Padlet so something to keep developing.

Yesterday was the day we began to write our stories.  To be honest, I was a little nervous to see if all our creative inspiration had made a different to the children's motivation and engagement to write.

How happy I was to see even my reluctant writers so excited to get started.  They were all so confident about their ideas, they knew exactly what they were writing about.  After 40 minutes of writing (with a few brain breaks and sharing opportunities) they were still engaged in their story.  YAH!! 
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Then today we spent a lesson doing some directed teaching around speech marks.  We used one of the photos a group created to write a conversation between the children in the picture.  They were so engaged in this task, that I didn't move onto making a picture story board like I was planning... I'm learning :)

We didn't quite finish our mahi in our first session, so I decided to give the children a good chunk of time to complete there work properly.  It's hard because a part of me is questioning spending all this time of the prompts...shouldn't I be writing more.... they are not writing....will this actually make a difference to their writing....what am I actually teaching? But I'm sticking to my guns and pushing forward, I know that actually to make this process actually work, I need to repeat it a few time so the children learn from their mistakes.  Trust the process and see the big picture.  The kids are super happy, love what they are doing so I'm hoping that will show in their writing.  In saying that, I have a few that I don't think see the purpose of this, so that's why I need to repeat it.  

Anyway, the end product was so cool... something I have never done before. I do need to plan in time for the children to share their learning and find ways to keep better tabs on each piece of work.

In this session we created our writing prompts buy using Pizap to cut out each photograph. The children showed real resilience, perseverance and focus when creating their scenes.  There was lots to be learnt about how to cut out their pictures accurately and how to get the background picture off the classroom blog properly.  One point of discussion was how big the people should be, also they soon realised they had to problem solve when one of their characters had no feet or arms!  

When it came to writing the speech bubbles, we probably could have done more discussion around how to make them  more interesting.  There was lots of "HELP" and 'Ahhhh" (without !) but using a few great examples of how to the speech bubble could relate to the environment the others soon began to think more creatively about what characters were saying.

 Next week I will do some teaching around speech marks as well looking at how to build this picture into a story board.  I'm not 100% how this will happen, or what order things will take place... at the moment my thinking is we will look at making a story board, but in experience sometimes children don't always follow it once they are writing.  So in keeping with my create first theory, I'm thinking maybe a photo story board....I'll need to do some more thinking around this.

Today we began to create some visual pictures as a writing prompt for our story.  We began by talking about what would happen if we really shrunk the class, I loved the way the classroom exploded into noise as they talked through their ideas. 

I used these images to get the children thinking  about what would it look like to be tiny, it really helped set the scene for the next part of their learning.  They loved the contrast of images, especially the person rock climbing on the donut! 

After that the children went off and took photo's of each other in different poses. We did talk about making sure we could see their face and they had interesting expression on their face.  I soon realised I also needed to say they should take a full body shot, otherwise their Pizap picture would be missing their legs or arms...there was a few "re-do" pictures.  But the children loved the activity, they were hanging off the rugby goal post, climbing the playground and jumping off the sandpit wall. 

Tomorrow we will need to put the picture together in Pizap and think about what each person would be thinking or saying.  This will begin to add the writing component as we will look at speech bubbles and speech marks.  Also starting to think about how they would solve this problem....

Today we created our "Shrink Ray" after watching a short clip from the movie "Honey I shunk the kids!".  Everyone was so excited to get started, the ideas flowed so quickly there was a buzz in the room.  Each group went straight down to business, choosing their equipment, discussing the role of each piece and making decisions on how to combine all their ideas.  
I can't wait to see how they are going to build a story around their machines tomorrow.  They all left class today  buzzing about what would happen if they really did shrink in class.....