Bring a red rug into school (the sort you can roll up and carry under one arm) and use it for story sharing in small groups with an adult helper (perhaps in secret locations around the school). Invite children to sit on the rug and talk about the special places they would like to go. For example: what would happen if this object…grew to be enormous? …had magic powers? …wanted a friend? …came to life? …belonged to somebody else (the queen, a lion, a visitor from outer space)? This is a wordless book told beautifully through the illustrations. A girl sits forlornly in a sepia world, ignored by her busy family. Spying a spot of colour in the shape of a red crayon, she draws a door through which she escapes to a green forest, illuminated by sparkling lights and blue lanterns, threaded through with a stream which leads her to the next stage of her journey, once she has drawn a red boat. She sails into the centre of a huge castle and, from there, draws new forms of transport so that she can explore this fantastic world. Then – disaster – she loses the red crayon. Will she be able to return home or even continue her journey? Collect some everyday objects in a variety of shapes and materials (a saucepan, an old bicycle wheel and an umbrella, perhaps?) and use them to spark ideas for stories. Create a box of ‘story prompts’ by writing questions on cards.

Reduced Challenge: Use the triangles like dominoes (still matching to make 10) and see what shapes you come up with.In a large, clear space, explore repetitive motions before creating a giant working ‘machine’ by combining individual actions. Start with a single child before adding each new motion to the whole. There’s also a fun paper lantern project that I put together for the good folks at All the Wonders that your students might enjoy. Look at the picture showing the girl falling through the air. If you were holding a crayon while you went for a walk, jumped, or turned somersaults, what kind of marks would you make? During PE, explore different types of body movements and imagine the lines and shapes you would create.

Look carefully at the front cover of our new key text. What do you predict will happen in the story? Who is the character in the boat? Where is it set? Think, discuss and record your predictions and we will see if you were right later on! You could record your ideas in a list, a mind map or even ask a grown up to record what you think. Why do people sometimes go on special journeys as part of their religion? Can you find out more about these? The illustrations were created using watercolour paints. Can you try to paint using a similar style?

glistening rivers, dramatic moats and dizzying waterfalls with a few artful strokes of her crayon, she is soon soaring above the clouds in a bright red hot-air balloon, Elements of Arabia, feudal Japan, and steampunk make this book a visual wonder. This book has a great message about using your imagination to escape boring situation, and how two children can use imagination together. What would the world look like from a flying carpet? Make a picture map to show the girl’s journey through the landscape in the book. To help with this, look carefully at each image for clues about the next location – for example, when the girl enters the forest, the jetty can be seen in the distance. What emotions do you think the girl is feeling? How can we tell? (This gives an opportunity to talk about body language. Younger children might want to show you physically by copying the girl’s body language and showing the expression they imagine on her face) For traditional oral storytellers the structure of a story is a framework that must be kept intact, rather like a set of bones. Individual retellings are marked out by added details and embellishments.

Learning Objective: Recall number bonds to 10 and and use these to calculate and reason with bonds to 100. Divide the book into sections and split the readers into as many groups. Example sections might be: Then she sees a beautiful purple bird getting captured by some samurai-type soldiers. She wants to save the bird. She frees the bird, but ends up imprisoned in a cage herself. The bird frees her by bringing her the red chalk. She draws a red magic carpet and flies away. The purple bird leads her to a purple door. When she goes through it, she discovers the bird's creator - a boy with a purple piece of chalk. Now she is friends with the boy and they will go on many adventures together. How wordless picture books like Journey can be used to develop children’s oral storytelling abilities Reduced Challenge: If your child has difficulty following the tutorial, please revise subtraction using this tutorial instead. Scroll to Week 4, Lesson 3 – Add and Subtract Problems. The worksheet is available here.

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The entire story is told through pictures full of magical detail. The colour red stands for play, imagination and doorways to enchantment. As the journey progresses, the colour mauve also comes into its own... Learners could also use the cards to make a shape (not necessarily a triangle) where the touching numbers add to 9 (or 8 or 11). Alternatively, they could add their own choice of numbers to these blank triangles to create their own activity. Imagine that you had a pen that could be used to draw (and create) real objects. What would you draw? Could you write a new story based on this concept? They should include dialogue which they will have to create themselves, based on what they feel the characters would say. Write a prequel to this story that explains where the magic red pen came from. Who owned it before the girl? Who made it? Why does it have special powers?