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| Years 4, 5 and 6 joined us for an assembly. Photo from school website. |
I spent an amazing and rewarding day working with two classes of utterly fantastic Y3 children. Loris Class and Kakapo class (great names, by the way!) worked on coming up with new mysteries for Jack, Scott, Emily and Drift, multi-tasking by planning the story at the same time as solving clues themselves.
Both classes had been reading an Adventure Island book in class, and learning all about writing mysteries, so they were already expert authors. We made sure that we worked out the crime in advance, gave the characters obstacles to overcome, and included lots of cliff-hangers. Every group - including the Map Mashers, the Pendragon Plotters and the Code Breakers contributed to plotting the stories.
The children had also recently been to visit White Scar Caves in Yorkshire and so were very knowledgeable about caves; I'm sure that experience will help them to imagine the scene when they get to the part of The Mystery of the Whistling Caves when Jack, Scott, Emily and Drift enter the cave. Geology meets fiction - what a great way to learn!
It was lovely to work with such enthusiastic and imaginative children, and thank you to the teachers for making me so welcome and joining in with the code-breaking, map-reading and mystery-plotting.
Thank you also for sending me some of the children's mystery-based writing. I've really enjoyed reading their brilliant work.
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| Suspense as we pick the to-be-stolen items from the treasure chest |
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| Code-breakers hard at work. Photos from school website |
This was my first visit to Walton-de-Dale and I hope it will be the first of many!