I had a busy day yesterday at Ranvilles Junior School in Fareham tackling four different topics across the four year groups. It was Book Week, so the children had come back from their Easter break to a (hopefully) fun day of me leading cartoon workshops and guidance on character creation.

The first session was with Year 4 who were looking at the Ice Age. We started off doing step-by-step drawings of commonly known Ice Age creatures that the children suggested before making up some utterly fictional animals along the lines of Ice Age's Scrat - so part one animal, part another. This resulted in a sabre-toothed mammoth and a Podo (possum and dodo).

Year 5 had just started studying Animal Farm, so it was my task to show them some cartooning tips for drawing pigs and horses, plus a last minute speed-drawing session of a cartoon bull.

After lunch I got to see Year 3 who were looking at The Gruffalo, and the brilliant way in which Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler introduce the character by describing his various monsterous body parts. We had a go at creating our own monsters with the children making the suggestions and me drawing them onto large sheets of paper. By far the weirdest was the creature whose body consisted of a ring doughnut with sprinkles.

Finally Year 6 were after cartooning tips to help them more accurately depict a 'good' character from a 'nasty' one, so we looked at face shapes, facial expressions and body language, creating an example character of each as we went.

All-in-all, a very busy but rewarding day and a lovely school to boot!