Educational Books

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100+ Ideas for Teaching Creativity (ISBN 0-8264-8478-6) / 100+ Ideas for Teaching Thinking Skills (ISBN 0-8264-8479-4) Continuum. Lots of practical activities applicable across a wide age and ability range.

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Countdown to Creative Writing, Routledge – a choose-your-own-adventure style strategy for writing prose fiction (ISBN 978-0-415-46855-8)

Countdown to Poetry Writing, Routledge – You can either use this book as a dip-in resource for individual activities and lessons, or as a programme of work for developing children’s sense of poetry and knowledge of the technical aspects of writing poems (ISBN 978-0-415-47752-9).

Countdown to Non-Fiction Writing – The third book in the Countdown to writing trilogy. The emphasis of this book is on the thinking that must occur in preparing to write and analyse pieces of non-fiction writing – questioning, interpreting, inferring etc. A number of the activities explore how we can distinguish between fiction, non-fiction, beliefs, truth, exaggerations, spurious arguments etc (ISBN 978-0-415-49259-1)

The Countdown books contain Teacher’s notes, photocopiable student activity sheets, a progression flowchart and extra material on the Routledge website.

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Jumpstart! Creativity (ISBN 978-0-415-43273-3). Part of David Fulton’s (Routledge) Jumpstart series, this is a handbook of over fifty interactive and multisensory techniques for developing mental flexibility and emotional resourcefulness in creative thinking. Sections cover creative thinking, questioning, reasoning, problem solving and wordplay.

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Developing Literacy and Creative Writing Through Storymaking: Story Strands for 7-12 year-olds – Published by Open University Press. This books aims to develop thinking skills and children’s ability to create narrative with the use of simple pictures put together into increasingly complex sequences. Activities are appropriate across a wide and ability range and work is carried out from the level of basic themes through to word- and sentence-level exercises. Extension material is available on the Open UP website.

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Coaching Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom: A Practical Guide for 7-14 – Published by Routledge and co-authored with Simon Percival. This book shows teachers and pupils how to develop creativity and flexibility of thinking within a life-coaching context. The activities touch upon various aspects of emotional intelligence / communication skills and address issues of problem solving and decision making. Can be used as part of the ‘happiness and wellbeing agenda’ and other initiatives related to emotional resourcefulness..

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Using Comic Art to Improve Speaking, Reading and Writing - Published by David Fulton, the book is full of techniques for using the organisation of comic panels as a 'visual analogue' to help children create, organise and refine their ideas prior to writing. We only touch on storyboarding: most of the activities are more versatile and sophisticated then that. Also, no knowledge of comic art is required, nor is any skill at drawing needed!

These are some of my more recent educational books. A full list of titles can be found on my Publications page. News of new and forthcoming books appears on the Bulletin Board