Don't Climb Out of the Window Tonight

I've always loved the book 'Don't climb out of the Window Tonight,' written by Richard McGilvray and illustrated by Alan Snow.

The Writing
Don't climb out of the window tonight because....

What a great sentence starter to give children to inspire imaginative writing.

At the start I only showed the children the front cover of the book, as I didn't want this to influence their own ideas.  We talked about what could be outside the window, at night time, that would really want you to just stay in bed.  The children were told that their writing and illustrations would be turned into an ebook and their audience would be other children.

I then modeled how they could play around with a sentence and make it more interesting.  The children also practiced this with some class examples.  One example: a big clown is smelling flowers.  How could we make this more interesting and use strong nouns to help our illustrations?  'A chubby clown is smelling roses,' or 'A giant clown is sniffing roses.'

Once they had three concepts it was time for them to start exploring the sentence they were going to write.  When each child thought they had an interesting sentence they wrote this on a strip of paper.  Each sentence was placed on the whiteboard, so they could be given any feedback to improve their writing.


The Illustrations
It was now time to read the class 'Don't Climb out of the Window Tonight,' to inspire their illustrations.  I wanted the children to really focus on the cross-hatching technique Alan Snow had used to illustrate this picture book.

I used a beginners tutorial from YouTube, on cross hatching, done by HelloArtsy.  Children also used paper to practice their cross hatching skills and also colouring pages.

When the children had finalised their composition each child drew their illustration onto good quality A3 paper.  They also used pencil to put in their cross hatching marks.  They went over the pencil lines with a permanent marker, like a vivid.

The children erased all of their pencil lines and used watercolour pencils to add colour.

Making the ebook
Each child came to school with their pajamas, soft toys, they messed up their hair and had a photo shoot behind a black screen.  I got one child to draw the house, with windows, that would be used to insert two photos of each child into the window.

This page would be used for the sentence Don't climb out of the window tonight because..... then the next two pages would have their sentence and illustration.  This would repeat until the end of the book.

I gave the job of recording the voices to a group of children in the class.  Each child read out their own sentence and each peer read out Don't climb out of the window tonight because...

As you can't insert an ebook into blogger I've uploaded a pdf version to Slideshare, of course you won't be able to hear the children reading their story.

Don't Climb out of the Window Tonight from Freevillerm6