Carol Kennelly, Assistant Head, Parkroyal Community Primary School, Macclesfield

I had particular goals for last year's work; I wanted a way of engaging and stimulating boys’ interest in fiction, for the children to have a focus for cross cultural studies and on a personal note, to develop my approach to teaching languages in a primary school.  

I have no formal language training, but have had vicarious pleasure from my own children’s exchange programmes with pupils from Amiens. Between the exchange students and trips to Amiens, I was beginning to feel like a part-time Picardian. In Amiens I recalled the city’s favourite son, Jules Verne; hard to avoid, with statues, roads, a university and a museum dedicated to the great man and his oeuvre. The germ of the idea broke the surface like Jules Verne’s giant squid. This too morphed into a many armed beast, with cross-curricular tentacles coiled around reading, writing, word and sentence work, vocabulary, numeracy, map work, science, languages, ICT and art (luckily a squid has ten tentacles!)

The core of the project and its primary challenge for me was to identify appropriate texts accessible to Key Stage 2 children. This done, I then discovered that rather than having topics for the original target of 3 to 4 weeks, that I had enough material for a term and beyond by the time we started.

We began with the life and times of Jules Verne (1828-1905). Using internet resources, we investigated the contemporary scientific advances which so enthralled Verne and inspired his books. What a time! The start of our modern world - if he had been so blessed, Jules Verne’s journey through life could have started with a trip on the first railways on George Stephenson’s Rocket, then across on the first transatlantic steamship Great Western and ending after the start of the first aeroplane flights with the Wright brothers. During his time were Charles Babbage and the first computer, Charles Darwin’s voyages on the Beagle, the discovery of anaesthetics and X-rays. In addition to the momentous there was the mundane; invention of the zip fastener, and especially Thomas Crapper and the first flush toilet, which as expected, caused great hilarity.

Boys and girls alike were fascinated by how the world had changed and related this to similar changes during their parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes. The children were fascinated by tin baths, life without television, mobile phones and computers!

Consideration of the life and times of Verne created topics for further lessons almost spontaneously. Children found the examination of scientific discoveries and the work of engineers fascinating. Investigating how machines worked allowed children to design their own Nautilus for undersea exploration and provide stimulus for their own stories.

Within Verne’s books the children’s imaginations voyaged around the world, to the centre of the Earth, beneath the sea and to the moon. The books of Jules Verne, however, were the birth of Science Fiction (rather than Fantasy) and were plausible, albeit brilliant extrapolations of sound contemporary science and engineering. These roots in reality provide a wealth of factual information which prompts the reader to identify destinations, measure distance, meet new people and discover different languages.

The books gave children opportunities to introduce the characters in various languages including Spanish, German and Dutch. The children listened to and read a variety of languages but principally (in honor of Jules Verne) in French.

We noted the countries visited by Phileas Fogg and Passpartout and the travels of Professor Otto Lidenbrock and Axel to Iceland to commence their descent towards the centre of the Earth. This was an opportunity for map work skills in both English and French.

Using directions in French nord, sud, est and ouest children navigated to Iceland to join Hans on the brink of the volcano and their adventure to the centre of the Earth. Continuing their journey children needed to learn the instructions tournez à droite, à gauche, allez tout droit and continuez tout droit in order to negotiate the maze and avoid the monster to win the treasure. Time being of the essence in their various journeys (particularly for Phileas Fogg!) it seemed appropriate that we tackled telling the time. 

Before they set off, adventurers need a kit bag, so the children decided on the contents and researched the names of the items in different languages. This inadvertently generated a number of tongue twisters, but the children confirmed the correct pronunciations on relevant language websites.  

It is estimated that Jules Verne is amongst the top five most translated authors in the world.  The children loved researching Verne’s books and strove to identify the many and exotic languages into which they had been translated.  This led to the children creating book covers in a plethora of languages from Welsh to Chinese. 

Throughout the children recorded their responses to the stories in various ways including Art projects, photographs and drama. These items and written work they collated in their own Jules Verne book. Each child also had been collecting ideas and materials to write their own creative adventure story. This story was redrafted in chapters and written up as the last item in their books.   

This year our project will continue to grow and to thrive, projecting Verne into the 21^st Century. From what we know of the Sage of the Somme, we can be sure that given the opportunity, our Jules would have incorporated modern computer technology and genetic engineering into his fascinating stories. The challenge for us is to replicate just a little of Jules Verne’s prophetic imagination into our own work.

Jules Verne le Maitre, vous nous guidez, nous suivons.

Resources for this project can be found on the Parkroyal Community Primary School website