Going to school here and now
A good way to involve primary children positively and empathetically with a distant place is to start from an experience our children share with those who live in the locality we want to explore.
The children in your class all came to school this morning - so did the children in Lisa Heydlauf's brilliant book, Going to School in India, the book that inspired me to design this activity.
Some aspects of their experiences will have been similar, some very different.
But, first, take some personal thinking time...
Teacher Activity: Your journey to school
Click to download the senses sheet
Have a look at the format of the senses sheet.
Think about your own journey to school, either as a child or nowadays as a teacher. Imagine yourself back at a specific point on that journey, possibly on a specific occasion. Take time to remember as vividly as you can.
Now, use the senses sheet to note down a few of your most vivid sense impressions, leaving out any words that aren't making an important contribution to the power of your descriptive phrases. What did you see, hear, feel on your skin, smell...? You don't need to labour every sense, but try to write as precisely and in as much detail as you can about the impressions you choose to record.
There is no need to write "I can see ..." , "I can hear ...", etc. as the icons representing four of our five senses start each sentence for us.
Don't try to remember the whole journey.
Concentrate on a specific moment.
Be as precise as you can.
Try for the words which will really make your reader see what you saw, hear what you heard and feel/think as you did, with your point of view/bias.
The Session
Click to download the senses sheet
You have now practised a version of what we will be asking the children to do in this session.
Note that this session could take place over one lesson, a full morning, or longer. The more time you have to encourage and involve children, the better the writing, geography and visual literacy that will result.
In the following example of this session in action, we see Y3 children from Watercliffe Meadow, Sheffield, gather their sense impressions of their journeys.
Ideally, we would have collected detailed sense impressions whilst walking together in the locality of school. As you'll realise from our results, we ended up working from memory and projected images because it was pouring with rain!
Read more... Download Session One (PDF)
Below you can see what the children actually wrote, and view the photostory that was created from the session.
Going to school in Shirecliffe, Sheffield: Sense impressions
Going to school in Shirecliffe, Sheffield: A Photostory
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Course Units
 Introduction |
 Getting Started |
 Going to school here and now |
 Going to school in India |
 Let's pull it all together! |
 Pedagogy and Thinking |
 Plenary |
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