Teacher Development

We are here today to learn about immersive writing experiences, to use for a trip at Box Hill, but also then to use within the classroom.

We’re the theatre company who have created the performance for Delight in the Woods and we’re also here to help you create devised work with young people, so that they can create their own immersive performance for outdoors at your school.

When you arrive for the CPD day at Box Hill you can expect a full talk through the whole project. We try and keep everything as active and as engaging as possible, so that you really feel like how your children might feel going through the programme. There’s plenty of time to ask lots of questions about how it might work for your specific class. We’ll go on a walk through the woods so that you can see the, sort of, the setting for this magical performance that unfolds when your children come for their Box Hill performance.

And then after the walk we will go through how the teacher-led programme works, how you can create that magic in your classroom, and then how the children can go about devising their own stories based on either a story book or a fairy tale that you guys are already using in your classrooms.

It’s nice to be able to use our own texts, I think that’ll make a big difference in the classroom and make it a little bit more curriculum focussed and make it a chance to really blend it in with our English lessons as well as everything else.

It’s been fantastic because I haven’t, I’m an NQT, and I haven’t really done much in the way of drama. I wouldn’t really have known how to go about it. Obviously, I have the training, but in terms of actually practically putting it into practice – and at the beginning of today I thought ‘Oh gosh, I wouldn’t really know where to start’, but they’ve really given us the building blocks and the steps that we need, sort of how to break it down. It was really amazing, seeing when we did it, how we went from sort of nothing to a script and just seeing how that might work in reality.

Really, really interesting, really helpful. Lots of things that you can definitely use in the classroom, not necessarily even linked to the Box Hill trip, but just thinking about other stories we do and ways to make the writing really real, to make the writing really rich. Yeah, it was really helpful.

Definitely doing the activities and seeing what it would look like in the classroom was really good and having advice from other people, cause I’m a one form entry, so it’s nice to have those other ideas and bounce off those.

I think getting the chance to go outside and actually having things that are real and tangible that they can smell and touch and hear and really get involved in. And it’s just that children like being outside, that’s where they play and make their own stories up but it’s bringing, sort of the classroom learning, outside.

Through a project like this, it’s absolutely exactly what we want to do, and that’s create these ‘wow’ experiences, so it’s memorable in people’s hearts and minds. And in turn, that they will have this association with nature, which is good and exciting, and that they will want to preserve it going forward.

Definitely do it, it’s definitely been worthwhile. And obviously, it’s only the first part that we’ve done today but I can definitely see the benefits and I’m quite looking forward to seeing the writing and the experiences that the class get out of it.

Yeah, a very good day, thank you.

I can’t wait. I’m actually gutted that we’ve got to wait half a term now, I’d like to just get back and get straight into it.