VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Chronicles of creativity R
osie de Vekey, teacher and Art Team and Wellbeing Lead at Mayflower Primary School in East London, tells Education Today about how a creative classroom immersive learning project, delivered with the help of Punchdrunk Enrichment, captured children’s imaginations.
Tell us about your school.
Mayflower Primary School is a local authority, inclusive, community school with more than 400 pupils in the heart of Poplar in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Our school is named after The Mayflower Ship, famous for taking early pioneers to America, and when children join Mayflower they ‘Set Sail for Success’ on their learning journey.
We want all our pupils to be successful and we are constantly searching for new and innovative ways to make learning even more exciting, so that everyone at Mayflower can enjoy the sense of adventure learning brings and discover how learning changes lives.
What is The Creature Chronicles? The Creature Chronicles is a digital immersive learning project for Years 2 and 3, designed to raise standards in oracy and literacy and promote teamwork, collaboration and
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www.education-today.co.uk creativity.
We got involved in a pilot of The Creature Chronicles last year. We had been involved in other immersive learning projects with Punchdrunk Enrichment in the past which had been really effective so we were confident that this project would have a similar impact. Following a step-by-step guide, the project is entirely led by the teacher in the classroom. We stumble across an advert left by a really fun, engaging character from another world calling for news stories of fantastic creatures. This leads the class to interact through videos and messages with the journalist, who enlists the children’s help to write stories, giving them a touchstone for their imaginations. The project uses cutting edge technology which makes the pupils feel like they’re experiencing real-time, personalised responses from a character who urgently needs their creative ideas. The project offers teachers a creative classroom approach to oracy and literacy whilst providing children the agency to follow their own instinctive learning styles.
I worked with another class teacher, splitting up our two classes into mixed groups. We wanted to leave it really open and see how the children wanted to engage with their learning. We knew that the cohort is extremely artistic so we had a group who were drawing and painting and creating what they thought
March 2025
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