Creating Monsters

On Wednesday this week, I spent a lovely day at St. Patrick's Catholic Primary School on the other side of Sheffield. It was my first school visit since getting back from my Australian adventures.

I was meeting just the KS1 children, so it was a day of wall-to-wall storytelling. I started with them all together in the hall, did some drawing at the flipchart, then read Class Two at the Zoo, always a favourite. 

Through the day, I saw three of the classes again in their classrooms, and we read another 5 stories, sang silly songs and did tons of drawing together. When I read Bears on the Stairs, I took the opportunity to do my class-eating poem with them, which I always really enjoy. If you haven't heard it, here is a little film, made by a teacher at a previous school visit. Watch the cute little boy in white:

Another of my favourite activities is the design-a-monster-by-committee game. I ask various kids about different elements of the monster, then do my best to illustrate their ideas, so we build it up a little at a time. The children always get really excited as the monster gets sillier and sillier. The deputy head at St Patrick's loved it too and wanted to share it with the parents, so she got me to recreate their monster after school, while she filmed it appear on the flipchart.

Thanks you SO much to everyone at St. Patrick's for such an easy and fun day, and a special thank you to Miss Hall, their much-loved art teacher, for looking after me so well.