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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

Storytelling ideas for Key Stage 2

Comic strip
Stimulate your child's storytelling skills with these unusual literacy activities.

In Key Stage 2 you can try to find alternative ways of encouraging your child’s storytelling skills. Approach storytelling from different perspectives, such as comic books or film adaptations.

Activity 1: Write your own comic story

Between the ages of seven and 11, most children become a fan of characters such as Dr Who, Batman, and Luke Skywalker, or become devoted to a hobby like ballet or hockey or cup-stacking. Why not encourage them to make their own comic based on their interest?

This will require a child to utilise a wide range of literacy skills – presentation, writing, creating stories, organising ideas into a coherent structure using layout, sections and paragraphs. It will also challenge them to develop the different types of material found within a comic - stories, letters, pictures, advertisements, and competitions.

What style should you use to tell your story? Should it be a cartoon style with script underneath or in speech bubbles? Should the stories be in plain writing with some illustrations around the edges?

Also encourage your children to think about the type of script being used. The Key Stage 2 curriculum encourages children to investigate different ones – bold, italic and underlined. What type of script should be used for the title? Should advertisements use a different script?

They can read some comics and analyse what goes into magazines to get inspired. Once they have their material prepared, it could even be scanned into a computer and given professional touches, such as adding photographs.

When the project is complete, it can be passed around the family to read. Maybe your child will decide to make up several issues!

Activity 2: Create your own ‘Horrid’ story

You could encourage children to make up a ‘Horrid History’ or ‘Horrid Science’ style story of their own. The fun (but informative) style of these books has great appeal to youngsters. Let them research an appropriate story in books and on the internet. They can choose something that they want to find out more about. The story needs to be interesting, quirky and offer insights into the subject matter.

This activity will involve the development of note taking skills rather than simply copying down information.  Using their notes, they can then go away and write it using the type of language and sentence structure to be found in the ‘Horrid History’ books, complete with black and white line drawings.

Such a task fits perfectly with the national curriculum’s requirements on understanding and interpreting texts. Children are required to make notes about main parts of the text, identify how texts are organised, and explore how different texts appeal to readers using varied sentence structure and descriptive language.

Activity 3: Creating riddles

Another fun task is to make up riddles. It’s a good way of exploring language by thinking, finding and putting to use new words. So encourage children to make up their own riddles to which you have to guess the answer. It doesn’t have to be complex – just simple ones, such as “What is blue and over your head?” (answer being the sky) will serve to stretch their imaginations.

Activity 4: Become a story-teller and performer

One of the great joys of writing your own story or poem is bringing it to life in front of an audience, seeing their reaction and basking in their applause! Encourage your child to present their work to you on a "stage" and settle in to enjoy their show!