an article by Frances Asti, International New Arrivals Teacher. Stanley Grove Primary Academy. Longsight. There’s a Starman waiting in the sky He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds… He told me Let the children use it Let the children lose it Let all the children boogie. David Bowie…

Frances Asti, new arrivals teacher at Stanley Grove Academy in Manchester, talks about using poetry to teach language skills.

I’m a huge admirer of Frances Asti, the international new arrivals teacher at Stanley Grove Primary in Longsight. A fervent advocate of poetry, Frances has taught me much about my own use of language and so I was delighted when she asked for a poem she might use in her lessons. The poem I chose…

I’ve been thinking about how words are edged out of our lives. My son was recently marked down for using ‘kids’ instead of ‘children’, and I can’t imagine anyone being encouraged to write t’other. Even my spellchecker scribbles an angry red line beneath it. And yet I love the sound of local speech. I love…

Try this poetry workshop and create a new sky National Poetry Day on October 4, 2018, is all about CHANGE and what bigger change can you imagine than creating a whole new sky? I find quite a lot of my poetry by looking up at the sky. My first book of poetry, Astro Poetica, is full…

Write your own colour poems! Writing colour poems can be fun. Be inspired by a painting or a walk and write something to brighten your day. Imagine being the owner of a market stall which sold colour. Scooped straight from the heart of a rainbow and wrapped in a cloud, your customers want the very…

In addition to writing books and filling this site with nonsense, Dom Conlon also visits schools, libraries and, well, ANYWHERE, to talk about stories and ROAR at children. One of the things he likes to do is to imagine what he would like to do if aliens ever visited our little planet. Would he show…

When one Year 3 class heard me talk about Tiny the Giant, they were inspired to create a beautiful book of their own. The children took Tiny and made him their own, sending him on wonderful adventures and often even illustrating their adventures themselves. Picture books in schools (at any level) can be a useful…

To write a brilliant story we need brilliant characters. The good news is that brilliant characters are EASY to make up. We just need to ask ourselves some questions. Like, WHY… Why is my character special? Why is my character interesting? Why is my character worth liking (or disliking)? Sometimes, when I create a character,…