Chris McDonald, headteacher and educational writer, combines ICT and critical thinking in this seaonal snowman story.

This activity uses ICT as a medium for discussing the feelings of a story character. It is based on a project carried out with upper KS1 and lower KS2 classes, where the children told and wrote stories featuring a snowman as the central character. The activity wasn’t intended as a writing exercise but focuses on speaking and listening, thinking critically and developing children’s language. The aim was to create a simple program and to consider the problems faced by the central character. We used the animation software Scratch, which is free and simple to use, but you could just as easily use 2Simple Infant Video Toolkit’s 2Publish or something similar. Using ICT as a medium for storytelling worked really well for some of the more reluctant members of the class.