Great ideas from Amy for comment

I have more questions about the drama because I am unsure how much we are supposed to do. I hope that’s okay.

I am going to look at the impact of drama on children’s imaginative writing.
1) Would you suggest comparing a piece of writing already written by the children to the piece of writing at the end of the drama? In that way I wouldn’t have to introduce the story to the children before the drama. Or is it better to introduce the story first and do some normal literacy work on it, then get children to start writing a story and then do some drama and get them to finish writing the story at the end of the drama and then compare these two pieces?

2) If I am just interested in the improvement of imagination in the writing would I ignore the other factors e.g. sentence structure and punctuation or would it be better to include these to then see if in fact the drama didn’t influence the imagination but influenced another area?
I would be very clear what you mean by imaginative & would personally look at sensory & figurative language & the effect it has on you & other readers rather than worrying about accuracy at this stage: creativity will lead to competence later as children want to hone a good piece into a great piece I believe A great book on encouraging writing is Myra Barrs The reader in the Writer or is it the other way round?! Suzie borrowed it from me if you want it

3) Do I make up my own questionnaires to give to children to ask about their enjoyment and usefulness? I know you said look at Kate Wall but it doesn’t let you view any of her work to see if it would be useable. Would you recommend buying her book about templates to find out children’s views and then adapting/using these? I have more questions about the drama because I am unsure how much we are supposed to do. I hope that’s okay.
Look at the first journal article listing on Kate Wall's page to see completed examples of the pupil view templates I do think they are a great idea & concrete evidence also http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/research/publication/28486

I intend to level a piece of writing with the teacher using level descriptors for composition and effect (which I am going to consider as my measure for imaginative writing-I’m not really sure what else I could use). Then I am going to ask children and the staff involved to rate how useful they found strategies and their enjoyment of the strategies. I was going to use a likert scale for this. Then the children will do a piece of writing at the end of the drama work, based on the story. Then the teacher and my self will level this writing using the same criteria as the other piece.
I will also get children to rate their overall enjoyment and usefulness for the whole thing-seeing if they think it has helped their writing.
From this I will compare the levels of imaginative writing between the first piece and second piece and see if any children have improved and if any haven’t. I will then look at if the drama has had an impact for different ability ranges compared to others etc. I will compare this to the overall enjoyment/usefulness the children stated for the drama work e.g. to see if those that rated it most useful did improve their writing.
Then, I will look at the enjoyment and usefulness of each strategy and compare the children’ ratings and the teachers ratings to see which strategy was the most useful/most enjoyable. Then I can reflect on these strategies.

This will all be done with the whole class but then I might focus more on the children that did and didn’t improve.

I was not really going to interview the children in any way about their views, I thought it would be better to get an overview from the whole class via the rating scales. What do you think? Would this be okay?