Yes Telling Stories and Making things.  I had a dream sequence a couple of years ago and I thought imagine if government eased off on teachers a bit in terms of curriculum overload and just as they signed off or were about to said sorry about that we overdid it and we trust you they then gave some final bits of guidance.  I thought that perhaps the best bits of guidance they could give was here is the content that you’ve got to cover and we suggest that you look at telling stories and making things and just by following those two pathways suddenly teachers as they intuitively new can make learning come alive.  Tell me the story in words of what we have just covered, do a drawing of what you’ve learnt in the maths lesson, map out on the floor the way in which monopolies work or make me a plasticine model of a design of the school of the future and suddenly it is a very fertile way of re-energising teaching.  Everything can really be taught or understood by following either or both of those pathways.   So children could be more creative.  Yes giving them the chance so that once they’ve heard it or read it or been taught it by a number of means to actually roll their sleeves up and make something, paint something, draw something, write something or else put together a story in words or on paper or in group narrative where they tell what they’ve learnt.  Two very useful reinforcement tools work well and the magical thing about telling stories and making things is the positive part that ICT can play suddenly we can record voice and turn it into a podcast, mix it with music to amplify the effect, we can take plasticine and turn five stills into an animation that tells a moving story.  So if we make the two pathways simpler at that level Im not sure that there isn’t anything we couldn’t teach!