Project outlines

All sessions were planned by Siobhan O’Neill and the class teachers, and were geared towards the specific children in the class. The sessions were planned with The National Framework for Literacy in mind, and linked to the school’s International Primary Curriculum. The sessions began with games to support speaking and listening skills, as well as helping to develop memory, imagination and storytelling skills. The sessions then focused an area of creativity (such as art, drama or music), and usually culminated in a piece of writing.

At the end of the project Year 2 performed in an assembly, where they shared and celebrated their work with their parents and the school. Various project images were shown as part of the presentation.
Click here to view the presentations.

Presentation 1
Presentation 2

Project 1: Exploring the five senses

Throughout these sessions, activities involved:
• Translating music into imagined worlds (using pastels, clay and collage)
• Tasting unidentified foods to inspire the creation of fruit and vegetable characters (character profiles)
• ‘Feely boxes’ of mixed materials to inspire imagined worlds

Project 2: Circus stories

These sessions focused on the story of Dumbo. We used the following activities:
• Storytelling, to inspire empathetic writing
• Recount to re-tell the story
• Drawing story maps
• ‘Hot-seating’ characters and character profiles
• Writing letters ‘in role’ to help express feelings.

Project 3: Curious Adventures

Over the course of a number of weeks, curious events kept happening around the school.
These included:
• Large green footprints appearing on the playground. The children made clay models
of the ‘giant’ and created some character profiles. They also produced some
descriptive writing about how the footprints could have appeared.

Click here to read some examples of the children’s writing.

• The chairs disappearing from the classroom. The children drew pictures, using pastels,
of where they had imagined the chairs had gone, and then wrote some descriptive
passages about these imagined places.
• The teachers talking in a peculiar language. Storyboards were made to show the
sequence of events and the children had to imagine what had happened.
• A toy mouse came alive in the classroom. The children wrote a class story,
based on this idea.

Click here to read the toy mouse story.