Engaging hard-to-reach parents. Communication-Tips-for-Hard-to-Reach-Families1. Creativity and the primary curriculum. Engaging effectively with outside agencies. What am I learning today?: Creative writing with Epic Citadel. After attending the Learning Without Frontiers conference last month, in particular seeing Tim Rylands' presentation (and then discovering Porchester Junior School's work), I was inspired to use the iPad and iPod app Epic Citadel with a group of children who were aiming to improve their writing through the use of longer sentences. The class consisted of 28 year 3 children and I was lucky enough to have them for three whole afternoons over one week. The first session was spent entirely in our function room. I had made the room as dark as I could without turning the lights off and as we only have one iPad at the city learning centre I used this in conjunction with a visualiser and our speaker system.
The class could hear the evocative sounds coming from the app as they approached the darkened room, which made them instantly curious about what was going on. Along the corridor to the room I had put up my three rules for the afternoon:1. Epic Citadel Teaching Toolkit.