David Almond learning resources – everyone is a writer
Writing and art activities inspired by The Savage and Half a Creature from the Sea
CFE Levels 3 and 4 (Age 12-14)
Contents
2Two things to bear in mind for writing activities
3Activities inspired by The Savage
13Shorter activities inspired by Half a Creature from the Sea
About this resource
This resource has been created to help you engage pupils of a wide range of abilities in writing activities. There are also some opportunities for cross-curricular activities and projects. Adapt and use as you see fit!
About David Almond and Dave McKean
David Almond is the award-winning writer of a host of best loved books for children, teens and young adults. He is perhaps best known for Skellig, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1998, and the haunting Kit’s Wilderness, as well as his more recent books My Name is Mina and A Song for Ella Grey. Find out more about David at his website or at Walker Books’ site
Dave McKean is an illustrator and author whose work is never less than completely arresting and distinctive. He is well known for his illustration of the Sandman comics written by Neil Gaiman, as well as the Arkham Asylum graphic novel. Recently Dave has worked on several children’s picture books and moved into filmmaking. Find out more at his stunning website:
Two things to bear in mind for writing activities
If pupils have a genuine audience for their written work, this can help to create motivation. Often, their work is solely written for a teacher to look at, but if they write for an audience which is likely to engage with their work, this can instil the task with more meaning. Why not try setting up a class blog? David Mitchell, a former deputy Headteacher, has set up the Quadblogging website to help you gain a genuine audience for your class blog:
Instead of always showing your pupils exemplars that you’ve chosen, get your pupils to go out and find texts that they like. They can bring these to class and you can have a discussion about them. This doesn’t always work – some pupils don’t have the confidence to do it, but in this case you can try directing them to a source like a book list. We have lots of lists to browse here:
Activities inspired by The Savage
Regular free writing Eng 3-31a
Blue writes his story of the savage with no thought of showing his writing to anyone. It’s just for him, serving as an outlet.
Set up a regular, brief period where pupils can write freely without being marked for spelling and grammar. Five minutes at the start of every lesson works well. Use a stimulus which you think will inspire your pupils. In this blog post, a teacher explains the kind of stimuli he uses for free writing:
You can find some good stimuli at the Writing Prompts site: These prompts from the TES website are also great (you’ll need to create a free login):
You can choose whether you want to look at pupils’ work or not. If you do ask to look at or hear what they’ve written, give feedback on the potential of ideas and nuggets in their writing to lead to longer pieces. Sometimes the prompts above will clearly point the way to a story, but if not, ask pupils to come up with two ‘what if’ questions based on their free writing.
To hear more from a teacher’s perspective about how free writing can work in the classroom, have a look at this blog post:
Less is more – creating an illustrated story
For less confident writers who struggle with extended prose, an illustrated story provides an opportunity to write limited amounts of text but put a lot of effort in to creating high quality prose (see The Learning Spy blog for some thoughts on the idea that ‘less can be more’ in writing:
This activity will help pupils to create a character, create an illustration of that character and write a short description introducing the character to readers. Bear in mind that the previous activity may well have yielded some good ideas for characters for pupils to draw on.
You can extend the activity if you want your pupils to spend more time on a particular skill covered here, but first, here’s a self-contained version aimed primarily at getting pupils to write engaging prose.
First, get pupils to come up with a character. In this video, author and poet Steven Camden reveals that he always starts with an image, either of an object or a person Have your pupils browse some images online and invent a character based on those images. Humans of New York is a great place to find interesting images of people - there are lots of pinboards on Pinterest which have collected images from HONY, but here’s one to start you off: Once they’ve found an image of a person who interests them, get them to ask some questions about that character. This site has a handy list of questions to help get to know your character better - you can pick out the ones you think will be most helpful to your pupils:
Make sure pupils come up with a goal/motivation for the character to have. Ask your pupils to write down something your character really wants, something they need, something they fear and something they resent. This will really help them feel get a sense of what motivates their character – and if you later want them to write an extended piece, it will help them shape their character’s path in the story. Use our Creative Writing Masterclass videos with Phil Earle to help your pupils further develop their characters - the video on characters is obviously of most relevance here, but the whole series is definitely worth checking out:
Then, ask pupils to draw a picture of their character. If you want to focus on developing pupils’ enthusiasm for illustration, you can use upcoming activities in this resource and merge them into this one. But for now, tell pupils that the purpose of drawing the picture is to help generate more ideas about appearance and setting. Ask them to draw a picture with the character placed in a setting in which they’re uncomfortable. Again, this helps to generate ideas, as it creates an immediate conflict if the character is in a situation they’d rather not be in.
Now, ask pupils to write text to accompany their illustration. The text should introduce the reader to the character, where they are, and how they’re feeling. It can be written in first or third person. Here’s a good example from ‘The Little Match Girl’ by Metaphrog, although your pupils are going to be writing in slightly more depth than this:
For the next part, here’s the key: your pupils are going to use the slow writing technique outlined by David Didau in this blog post: You can introduce this technique in different ways – if you wish, you can ask pupils to write their text first, and then ask them to refine it using Didau’s method. You can also choose to model the technique by trying it yourself and sharing your writing with pupils. As Didau explains, the technique can generate writing which pupils are proud of, and helps them to appreciate that quantity isn’t everything when telling a story – the graphic novel medium really helps with this because the pictures can act as a complement to the words and show physical details, leaving the writer free to convey the character’s thoughts and feelings through text.
Extensions to this activity
The obvious extension to the activity is to write an extended piece. But since the activity has involved both writing and illustration, there are several options you can choose, each of which achieves slightly different aims.
If you want to continue to focus on pupils’ ability to use language, as well as their ability to structure a story, then try the next activity, which focuses on planning a narrative.
If you also want to incorporate illustration skills, try the rest of the illustration activities in this section, which will help pupils think more deeply about how to use illustrations effectively.
All of these skills can be developed using our How to Write a Comic Book Scene resource: This resource does focus on adapting an existing scene from a novel rather than coming up with completely new characters and plots, but still requires a lot of critical decision making.
Planning and writing a story
It’s hard, and not necessarily advisable, to write stories to a formula. Instead, give pupils a few questions to think about at each plot point. If you’ve used the previous activity to establish a character and a problem/motivation, then you can use these questions to develop pupils’ thinking at each plot point:
What does your character want at this point in the story?
Who or what is standing in the way of your character getting what they want?
What does your character do to try to overcome this problem?
Does something unexpected happen?
These questions help to keep your pupils going. It’s usually really effective to model how to use them, because they won’t all apply at every stage of the story. Plan your own story as your pupils plan theirs, and share how you use some or all of the questions to create plot points.
If pupils are doing an extended piece of prose, it’s important to remember that a first draft is about getting the ideas on paper. Spelling and language shouldn’t matter on a first draft – try to give feedback about structure, characterisation and setting.
The second draft is the time to focus on language. The slow writing technique outlined earlier may work well.
Discussing and selecting illustration styles
Dave McKean has illustrated many different texts and his style is always striking and powerful. In this activity, your pupils will identify features of his style and compare it to other illustrators’ styles. They will then look at how different art materials can be used to create different effects, and finally choose their preferred materials to create an illustrated text.
Firstly, look at McKean’s style with your pupils. Before you discuss his work in The Savage, encourage them to think about how illustration styles differ. You can pick any artist or illustrator you like to do this, but the example below, showing McKean’s illustrations of Batman against some of the early Batman comics, might provide a good start:
Which illustration style do the pupils prefer? How do they feel about the character as depicted in each image? What do they notice about each artist’s use of colour, lines and shapes?
You can move from here to discussing The Savage. How do they think The Savage might be affected if the illustration style was more like the right hand picture?
The page below is a particularly good one for talking about McKean’s stylistic decisions – you can ask pupils why they think McKean has chosen to repeat an image with different framing and why he has chosen to depict the savage from a particular angle in a particular position, as well as more general questions like why he has chosen to use a limited colour palette and whether his drawing style is realistic or more abstract.
It’s particularly important to ask your pupils if they feel that the illustration style is an appropriate one for the story. How would they describe the atmosphere of the story, and how does the illustration style capture this? How well does the illustration style convey the characters and setting?
Image from The Savage by David Almond and Dave McKean, Walker Books 2008
To consolidate the learning from this discussion, you can encourage pupils to visit different illustrators’ websites and report back to the class about their favourites/least favourites. You could get them to use Padlet to compile a digital wall of images, with comments beneath each illustration. The comments could be biographies of each illustrator, or brief critiques of what the pupils like about each image.
Trying out different illustration materials
Approach an Art and Design teacher in your school and ask if your pupils can come to their classroom for a demonstration of different materials being used to depict a subject. Ideally, pupils will have a chance to try out four different materials, but within one lesson it’s only realistically possible for them to try out two.
After they’ve tried every material, have a brief discussion, giving pupils the chance to say what they liked and disliked about each material and what their favourite one is.
Now, ask them to use their favourite material to do some illustrations for the stories they wrote in the ‘Planning and Writing a Story’ activity on page 5. One or two detailed illustrations will be better than numerous less detailed ones – the task is all about trying to convey character, setting and atmosphere as effectively as possible through illustration, so give the pupils time to think carefully about their illustrations.
Afterwards, get the pupils to look at each other’s work and give feedback. Depending on the needs of your pupils, you can ask them to give very general feedback about what they like about each other’s drawings, or you can be more specific and ask them to critique how effectively drawings have conveyed character, setting and atmosphere.
Podcasting about bullying
In TheSavage, Blue experiences verbal bullying at a particularly challenging time of his life. In this activity, your pupils will create a podcast on the topic of bullying. To get some technical advice about how to start podcasting, check out both our Malcolm McNeil learning resources at and this blog post from secondary teacher Peter Kelly: These resources will give you advice about software and other practicalities, as well as introducing pupils to podcasting and structuring a podcast.
Researching for a podcast
As you’ll see in the Malcolm McNeill resource, there can be space for up to 4 topics in a podcast. This resource from teacher and author Phil Beadle can be a great start for pupils in establishing some ideas and insights about bullying and bullies:
After this, additional topics for research can include:
- The effects of bullying.This page from the Stop Bullying website is a good place to start research:
- Cyber bullying. What are the particular dangers of the internet, and what can be done to protect yourself against cyber bullying? There’s lots of information here:
- Bullying in the workplace. It’s important pupils know that bullying can happen, and be challenged, in any environment. As this page points out, bullying can often be dismissed in a workplace:
Informative or persuasive?
You can choose whether pupils’ podcasts are purely informative or whether you would like them to express opinions backed up by evidence. In either case, all of this work can easily lead to written pieces too!
If you and your pupils loved The Savage
Check out these lists of graphic novels:
Shorter activities, inspired by Half a Creature from the Sea
Write tweet summaries of the stories
A tweet is composed of 140 characters or less. Challenge your pupils to compose summaries of the different stories using only 140 characters. These summaries should try to describe a main character and the conflict they are experiencing in the story. To make it more challenging, ask pupils to try and include descriptions of setting and atmosphere in their tweets – the character limit forces them to think hard about how to use language creatively and economically.
Use your local town to inspire a talk
Ask pupils to create mood boards representing their thoughts and feelings about their local town (a mood board is very simply a board onto which you stick images which have a common theme). The board can contain images of the places which mean most to pupils, or images which represent their feelings about aspects of their town. Then, ask pupils to use their mood boards as the basis for a talk about what their town means to them. You can also ask pupils to create a digital story, where they record narration over a series of images – find out more at the Tech4Learning website:
Misunderstood characters
Half a Creature from the Sea features many characters who are misunderstood or even rejected by society. Ask your pupils to come up with a character who is misunderstood in some way. It can help to think of this in terms of dichotomies – for instance, the bullying and mean-spirited traffic warden who secretly performs at sick kids’ hospitals, or the dishevelled tramp who is wealthy but gives all his money to charity. Ask your pupils to come up with a character and a thing that no one knows about them. Get them to write two short paragraphs – one featuring the character as others see them, the other in a situation where the character’s true nature can be revealed.