workshops, insets and residences

workshops and INSETs

Teachers and librarians are uniquely placed to inspire children about story. Our workshops offer a range of ideas and skills to help. These can be at any time of day, as one-offs or as part of longer programmes or partnerships.

Our current workshops include:

storytelling for teachers and librarians: learn the magic of telling a story without a book!

speaking and listening through story: a toolkit of ways to using story to develop speaking and listening skills in your class (KS1 and 2).

story making and the creative imagination: how to help your class build their imagining and narrative skills to develop ideas for story.

We offer sessions as twilight trainings, whole day insets and longer term school partnerships. We can also design tailor-made partnerships if required.

residencies

We offer tailor-made projects for individual schools, from single day visits to term-long residencies.

Each of our residencies places a storyteller or writer in a school for several days, usually spread over a few weeks. This allows for extended project work with individual classes as well as regular performances to the whole school. It can also include sessions for parents or teachers. For the school, the impact on speaking, listening, reading and creative writing will be greater. For us, this is a valuable chance to continue exploring, refining and evaluating techniques for working with story.

So far,we have run extended residencies in two disadvantaged areas of Oxford exploring how children prefer to learn about stories and trialling ways of working with parents and teachers to support children’s interest in story.

We are also beginning to explore partnerships with individual schools or clusters of schools.