I’ve just come to the end of a series of days working with children at Reaside School in Frankley in Birmingham. Four of us were briefed through Stan’s Cafe (I love Stan’s proper use of the apostrophe) and creative partnerships to use podcasting to tap into the children’s imaginations and their skills at evolving and structuring stories.

You can listen to and see all the work the children created at a website we have established for this and future work: www.frankleytalk.com

Early work was focussed on where the children live – the streets and neighbourhoods of Frankley and what this means to them. One piece that popped out of this was a podcast on renaming an imaginary street. Most of Frankley’s streets are named for either monarchs or British islands. The year 5 group plumped to name their new street after someone they know, one of their nan’s. So Wendy Scattergood (’tis truly her name) has became a symbol of the things that grown ups do which children appreciate: