In this section, you will find information regarding the implementation of Greg Bottrill’s approach to ‘The Drawing Club’ and ‘The Message Centre’ and also Shonette Bason’s approach to ‘Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle’.

Drawing Club

In our Reception classes, we use Greg Bottrill’s Drawing Club to form the basis of our Literacy lessons. 

Drawing Club allows us to open up the magic world of tales and story to children whilst at the same time enriching their language and vocabulary, developing their fine motor skills, and building upon their application of phonics. Drawing Club is a highly creative approach that immerses children into a world full of imagination where anything can happen and often does!.

Drawing Club is a true adventure. It is based on a perfect mixture of picture books, tales, and animations. The approach involves time together as a whole class on Carpet Kingdom, followed by time spent with children exploring their own ideas and creativity. Drawing Club puts us, the creative teachers, back at the center of our teaching, allowing us to have the freedom to adventure and effectively bring the world of stories to life! 

“I love teaching writing through Drawing Club as it brings magic into our classroom and pushes the children to be creative, inventive, and adventurous. The children are excited and willing to have a go, they love to share their marvelous ideas and the progress they make is unbelievable! From mark-making to sentence writing, Drawing Club guides the children in their development and allows them to discover the joy of writing.”

– Miss Korenika, Reception Class Teacher

The Message Centre

Across the setting, we use Greg Bottrill’s ‘Message Centre’ to inspire and ignite child-initiated writing and mark- making. The Message Centre is all about messaging! It develops a sense of purpose and magic into the children’s mark making.

The message centre enables our children to explore the joy of messaging, an approach to sprinkling extra joy over the top of their day, showing them how reading, writing and mathematics can be hidden in and around their room and outdoors too. Our children love hiding and finding – think pass the parcel, birthday presents, egg hunts and hide and seek. There is a buzz to be had, and it is this buzz that the Message Centre approach has at its heart.

“In Nursery, we like to be sneaky and write secret messages onto masking tape and stick them onto a teacher’s back without them noticing. We have developed our imagination and joy of mark making by writing messages to different characters that we have discovered visiting our classroom or even living inside enclosed spaces such as Chase from paw patrol or even pirates!”

– Miss Morton, Nursery Class Teacher

Secret Symbols

We love creating secret symbols together in EYFS. A secret symbol can have many powers and creates no limits to your imagination. Teachers and children can create secret symbols to build on their play and create a sense of magic! We might hide a secret symbol in our shoe to make us run really fast or we might draw a symbol that sends a rocket that we have just built. 

Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle!

In Nursery, we use ‘Squiggle Whist You Wiggle’ to support the development of children’s early mark making skills. Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle’ is an Early Writing programme created by Shonette Bason.

We use the programme as a way to support the beginning of our children’s writing journey. We use dance and big movements to develop the children’s fine motor control needed for writing. We start by holding a flipper flapper (small pieces of fabric) in each hand whilst dancing along to music and following the teacher’s instructions. Some of the movements involve moving our arms up and down, side to side, in large circles and in wiggly lines. We then transfer these moves on to paper. The children swap their flipper flappers for two thick pens and repeat the movements whilst making marks on paper. 

As the children become more confident with the marks they are making we then begin to use the marks to create a drawing that is related to what we are learning. For example, if we are learning about ‘mini beasts’ we will use our flipper flappers and large pens to practice the skill of drawing a wiggly line before drawing a picture of a wiggly worm. These sessions are great fun for the children but also means that our children become confident mark makers!