We reached the end of our first year of Once Upon A Time in June this year and came out with some fascinating results.

In the early part of the year our children undertook an assessment of their vocabulary and oral narrative skills. This assessment was completed by our Speech and Language Therapist using the Renfrew Word Finding Test and the Renfrew Bus Story Assessment respectively and formed a baseline for the measurement of the project.

 

As you can see from the charts above a substantial proportion of our cohort were scoring below the expected range for both vocabulary and oral narrative at the start of the year and it was the anticipation of this picture which prompted the creation of the project.

After 8 months of Once Upon A Time sessions, to address the oral narrative element, alongside Word Boost sessions aimed at addressing the vocabulary gap, the children underwent the same assessment.

As you can see from the charts the project had a huge impact on oral narrative skills. We went from 61% of our children scoring below the expected range for oral storytelling to, 8 months later,  79% scoring within or above the expected range.

The 21% who remained below the expected range still made significant progress during that time but did not make it in to the expected range for their chronological age – in most cases this was due to other known factors including additional support needs.

There were also gains across the board in terms of vocabulary development.

Whilst there were a smaller percentage of children moving into the the ‘expected range’ bracket it it is worth drilling down a little, into the gains made during the 8 month period.

As you can see from the chart on the right – 62% of children made more than 8 months progress with their vocabulary during this 8 month period – their individual starting point was what determined whether that progress led them into the expected range.

However I felt that, in the second year of the project, vocabulary was still an area which we could develop and make greater gains.

For the coming year I have created a new improved version of the project with an added vocabulary element.  It focuses particularly on common words which will assist the children with sentence construction both when speaking and ultimately when writing and which will support their early progress in reading.

The infographic below outlines the structure of the project for the coming year. We focus on each book for 2 weeks with 2 Once Upon A Time sessions per week and related play provision across that fortnight. I can’t wait to see how the new improved version supports the development of our cohort this year. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments below!

 

 

Our P1 children are very adept at talking about what they are learning but we are always looking for new ways to promote metacognition and encourage them to reflect on what they have discovered. It is especially important in our play-based context to provide a way for children to share thier independent discoveries as well as the things we learn as a group.

To that end I recently set up a ‘Show What You Know’ station in our classroom. This is a slightly Heath-Robinson-esque ‘booth’ containing an ipad and a set of instructions to allow children to record thier own short video clips sharing what they have learned or what they are proud of that day.

Obviously alongside the metacognitive benefits of this activitiy there are also digital literacy / technology benchmarks being addressed.

Now we have of course had our fair share of random musings, funny faces and dance moves recorded at the ‘Show What You Know’  (even those are still hitting the technoloy benchmarks) but alongside that there have been fabulous video clips of children proudly sharing thier achievements and successes.

We will keep adding to the collection below as new clips come in to the station!

 

Thank you so much to those who took the time to read about our Once Upon A Time project and tweet me / message me about it. It was great to receive such a supportive and positive response to the idea.

I wanted to take a moment to update you on the progress of the project and offer some more information to those who are thinking about doing something similar.

Firstly here is a link if you want to download the story map template – click here Once Upon A Time Map. We usually print it out at A3 for mapping stories and write directly on it.

Secondly I wanted to review our progress against our intended outcomes:

Intended Outcomes as stated in the last post:

• Every child in P1 will have experienced a rich array of ‘classic’ and new, high quality picture books.  We have now almost completed our original list of 25 books – the children were always very keen to tell us if they had seen on heard a particular book before and this only happened on a handful of occasions so I feel confident that we have given the majority of children the experience of a superb array of books which they had not had contact with before. We are shortly going to be asking the children to vote on their favourites and let us know which stories have stayed with them. More on this in my next post.
• Every child will understand that a story has a beginning, middle and an end. This has absolutely been achieved – they know as soon as the ‘wiggly line’ comes out that we will be talking about the shape of the story and they know that every story has these parts. We have also used the story mapping model to investigate other stories such as ‘Smartie the Penguin’ for safer internet day, and ‘Gorilla Loves Vanilla’ as part of our Book Week Scotland celebrations.

 

• Children will be able to listen to a story and recall what happened at the beginning, middle and end. We have nearly 100 Once Upon A Time maps to evidence development in this area. At the start of the project many children would just tell you the last thing that they recalled about the story which would often be events at the very end. The children are now able to cognitively sequence the information and tell you things which happened at each point in the story – you can see this on the maps as we number each contribution to indicate which ideas were shared first, second, third etc.

• There will be an improvement in children’s ability to generate their own 3-part stories – assessed by ‘cold writing’ pieces throughout the year and compared to the baseline from the start of P1. This element of the project has actually become Once Upon A Time PART 2! We are now using the Once Upon A Time story map template as the planning format for all of our writing lessons. In order to reinforce the idea that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end the children are planning their own story writing using that familiar template to encourage the creation of three-part narratives. We are also making the template available at the writing table so children can plan their own stories independently in that format. The three part structure is clearly evident in all of the stories that the children tell.

Project Rationale

They say you have to hear 1000 stories before you are ready to write your own. This is great news for a child coming in to primary school who has had a bedtime story every night of their life. Even assuming you don’t fully remember the ones from before you were 2 and that there have been some (many) repeats of particular favourites you will have comfortably had your 1000 story dose before you start school. But what if you don’t generally get a bedtime story?

Maybe you don’t have access to that many books, maybe you don’t have a ‘bedtime’ as such, maybe your family circumstances for any number of varied reasons mean that the capacity for sharing stories is limited. This means that the first time you are asked to make up a story in school you may not have a sense of what sort of thing ‘a story’ is. You don’t have a stock of go-to phrases like ‘Once Upon A Time’ which help you to put together ideas of your own, you haven’t heard hundreds of tales which have the happy beginning, the middle stage sense-of-jeopardy and the peaceful resolution which characterise so many familiar narratives. You may not even have the vocabulary to describe the idea that you have in your head.

In her brilliant and inspiring book ‘Upstart‘ Sue Palmer recalls an anecdote from a fellow literacy specialist Pie Corbett – he asked a range of children the simple question ‘Can you tell me a story?’  and whilst some could offer a reasonably coherent narrative there were many who could only offer disjointed words and phrases. One little boy just kept saying ‘fish’ and it eventually transpired that the title boy was trying to describe ‘Finding Nemo’ which he watched every night on DVD before bed – he had been exposed to the story in a visual form but had never heard a spoken narrative of the story.

When I read the story of The Little Boy Who Said ‘Fish’ I had been thinking about the different ways to support children to think about the ‘shape’ of stories and I also wanted to find a way to be sure that ALL of the children in our P1 cohort had heard all the UNMISSABLE picture books which form part of so many peoples understanding of story telling. So I designed The Once Upon A Time Project.

Project Aims

• To identify 25 unmissable picture books which every child should experience. 
• To introduce the idea that every story has a ‘beginning, middle and end’.
• To support children to ‘map out’ each of the Once Upon A Time stories so they can see how the story is structured. 

Intended Outcomes

• Every child in P1 will have experienced a rich array of ‘classic’ and new, high quality picture books. 
• Every child will understand that a story has a beginning, middle and an end. 
• Children will be able to listen to a story and recall what happened at the beginning, middle and end. 
• There will be an improvement in children’s ability to generate their own 3-part stories – assessed by ‘cold writing’ pieces throughout the year and compared to the baseline from the start of P1.

Methodology

The first stage was to identify the 25 books we wanted to use for the project. I was unable to find a suitable extant ‘top 25’ list so I eventually crowd-sourced my list by talking to fellow readers, fellow parents, fellow teachers, writers and illustrators.

The final list is as follows:

Where the Wild Things Are by  Maurice Sendak

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Paddington by Michael Bond

Dogger by Shirley Hughes

Lucy and Tom at the Seaside by Shirley Hughes

I want my hat back by Jon Klassen

The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss

Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson

Ada Twist Scientist by Andrea Beaty

The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr

The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson

Not Now Bernard by David McKee

The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton

Peepo by Janet and Alan Ahlberg

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen

Hairy McLary from Donaldsons Dairy by Lynley Dodd

Penguin by Polly Dunbar

Elmer by David McKee

Gorilla by Anthony Browne

Oi Frog by Kes Grey

Dragon Loves Penguin by Debi Gliori

The list is a starting point. We will definitely cover all of these books but the project can be extended to take in other titles which the children might express an interest in.

Each week we are reading one of the stories to our key group and we are asking them to think about the structure of the story as we read. Having heard the story the children think back and try to establish between them what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. We map out their ideas on a linear story planner on which we indicate that the far left of the line is the beginning and the far right is the end. Each time the child offers an idea about something that happened we indicate where abouts on the line that part of the story happened and we keep mapping until we establish a timeline of the narrative. We then read their version of the narrative back to them reinforcing the idea of the beginning the middle and the end.

 

In the 2 weeks since the start of the project we are already seeing a significant change in the children’s ability to identify the beginning, middle and end and I am excited to see how this understanding of structure feeds into their next ‘cold writing’ piece. Do follow me on twitter to keep up with the progress of the project.

 

 

I am a persistent advocate for using recently published texts in the classroom.

During my teacher training I read this excellent paper by O’Sullivan and McGonigle…

Which found that “many teachers were not continuing to develop thier knowledge of children’s literature and that this seemed to be having a significant effect on their practice, limiting the range of literature they introduced to children. For example 45 per cent of the 364 teachers surveyed in 2008 named Roald Dahl as their favourite author when they were children and of these 43 per cent were currently, or had recently, read a Roald Dahl book to their classes.”

Now I love Roald Dahl as much as anyone and my own kids love him too but I feel a real responsibility to try and bring the work of new, living authors into classrooms as much as possible. To ensure that children are exposed to a diverse range of high-quality literature that goes beyond classic texts which, with luck, they might be introduced to by a parent or a grandparent or a friend or a librarian.

The O’Sullivan and McGonigle also found that…

“professional development to increase teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature and to enable them to develop creative pedagogies based on texts can have a significant impact on children’s motivation and attainment.”

This became a real catalyst for me in terms of the choices I make about texts in the classroom and it has been a strong driver also in my work as an ‘Authors Live Champion’ with the Scottish Book Trust.

With that in mind I wanted to share a project which I ran with my P2 class a couple of years ago based on a BRILLIANT book which was published in 2014. Please feel free to use any of the resources attached and comment below if you use them! Let me know how it goes!

CAKES IN SPACE by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre

Cakes in Space is a story about a girl who gets on to a space ship with her family for a voyage which will take 199 years but during which she will be frozen so that when she arrives at her destination she will be ready to start a new life on the planet Nova Mundi!

This unit of work ran across a whole term. The class was split into co-operative learning groups which we called ‘Topic Pods’ after the pods that Astra and her family sleep in in the story. All of the group tasks in the project were undertaken by the children within these co-operative groups. I read the book at a rate of approximately a chapter a day – we finished the book before we finished the project but we did not need to have read the whole book before we started. When we finished the children were SO in love with the book that they asked me to read another book by the same authors – we went on to read Oliver and the Seawigs but there are now many other EXCELLENT options!

There were 3 assessment activities which were the core of the project.

Assessment Activity 1: Design and Build Space Craft.

• Outcomes: TCH 1-01b, 1-12a, 1-13a, 1-14a, 1-14b, 1-15, EXA 1-06a,
• Assessment Evidence: Observation of group work, creation of pictorial design, creation of 3D model.

Assessment Activity 2: Moving to Nova Mundi – discussion and writing activities related to the creation of a new society.

• Outcomes: SOC 1-17a, 1-16a, ENG 1-17a, LIT 1-22a
• Assessment Evidence: Statements made during discussions, written work.

Assessment Activity 3: Arriving on Nova Mundi – drama and dance activity imagining what it would be like to be on the ship and then to arrive on Nova Mundi.

• Outcomes: EXA 1-09a, EXA 1-13a, EXA 1-14a
• Assessment Evidence: Movement work – use of body to express ideas, short drama pieces created in small groups.

ACTIVITY ONE

Design and Build A Space Craft

Here the context allows for focus on imagination, design for the future, solving problems through design and creation of models to represent ideas. We undertook a group activity where the children designed a space craft for a journey like the one taken by Astra and her family in the story. They needed to consider all the elements that would be required for a similarly long voyage and design a layout. They then created a 3D model of the ship.

There are a series of 5 design frameworks which can be used over 5 sessions to help the groups to draw out their design ideas. You can click on the design framework names below to download PDF versions. I printed these out at A3 size.

Framework 1: I encouraged them to think first about the name of their group/pod and the proposed name of their spacecraft. Then they thought about the top 5 things that a space craft would need.

Cakes in Space Design Framework 1

Framework 2: Then they decided who was going and where they were going to and what rooms would be needed aboard the ship.

Cakes in Space Design Framework 2

Framework 3: Then they decided the interior layout of the ship – I encouraged them to write the list of rooms on post-it notes and stick them on so they could move the rooms around. I asked them to think about what rooms should be / should not be next to one another for practical reasons e.g. don’t put the ‘disco room’ next to the ‘sleeping room’.

Cakes In Space Design Framework 3

Framework 4: The next session was about drawing a labelled diagram of the exterior of the ship – there are a series of rectangles to be cut out and written on to make labels on pg1 and a big space for the exterior design on pg2. It is hard for all the group members to draw together so this could be done as a collage and stuck on or it could be done digitally?

Cakes in Space Design Framework 4

Framework 5: The final design framework allows the children to plan a junk-model of their space craft with a focus on the resources that will be required. They should have framework 4 to refer to so that they can see what they are trying to create.

The two stars and a wish evaluation box on the right was used by the group to self-assess the model once it had been constructed!

Cakes in Space Design Framework 5

ACTIVITY TWO

Moving to Nova Mundi

This element of the project has a literacy focus and also creates a forum for the children to consider what it would be like setting up a new society on a new planet.

Writing ideas

We did a series of pieces of written work during the project. Some of which were procedural in focus and some which were much more emotional.

Titles included:

• How I feel about moving to a new planet – we wrote a piece, either from Astra’s perspective or that of another child on board the spaceship, talking about how we felt about leaving our home and going to Nova Mundi. We talked about how we might have mixed feelings of sadness and excitement about different aspects of the move.
• Instructions for Astra – we wrote step by step instructions for Astra to tell her what to do when she woke up having arrived at Nova Mundi.
• Arriving on Nova Mundi – we wrote about landing on Nova Mundi and imagined what we might see when we got there.

Creating a New Society

Our work on this element of the project coincided with the Scottish Independence Referendum so we spent some time discussing whether we would want our new planet to be self-governing or whether the laws and rules of the new planet would be an extension of those on earth.

We talked about what language we would speak, would it be our Earth language or would it be a new Nova Mundi language. We talked about different countries having different currencies and thought about whether we would have our own currency or use Earth money. We talked about whether we would need our own army to defend Nova Mundi or whether the Earth army would protect us if it were needed.

Eventually we held a vote, complete with ballot papers and a ballot box, to decide whether we would be governed by ‘Earth Rules’ or ‘Nova Mundi Rules’.

ACTIVITY THREE

Arriving on Nova Mundi – Dance and Drama.

Still working in their topic pods the children used dance to explore ideas of weightlessness and how you might move around whilst travelling in space compared to how you might move when you landed. I provided a variety of space-themed music from Holst’s ‘The Planets’ to David Bowie and encouraged them to create short sequences of movement with defined sections where each member of their pod was undertaking the same movement at the same time. This required discussion and agreement with regard to choreography, synchronising the movement to the music and focus from all group members to follow the sequence along with their peers.

In drama we created short pieces imagining the arrival on Nova Mundi. Some groups imagined that there were aliens already living there who either welcomed or resisted the new arrivals! Others all took on characters who had arrived on the space ship and had to decide what to do in the moment that they set foot on their new planet. Again this required co-operative working to plan the scene, it required each member of the group to take a defined role, I asked that every member of the group have something to say and asked that it be spoken clearly and audibly, with an awareness of the position of the audience in relation to the performers.

You may find as you read this fantastic book with your class that any number of other avenues open up to you in terms of planning. My class and I loved this book and got so much learning and enjoyment out of exploring the story in all these different ways. I would love to hear if you did something similar and if you use any of the suggestions and materials above please do let me know in the comments section below.