Should your creature be fierce or friendly?
5
Writing stories about the creatures
You can use the small Skillies and the larger creatures that the children make as a stimulus for story writing. There are several approaches. You could ask the children to imagine what it is like to be a real life fierce or friendly Skilly. Where would you live? What would you eat? Are you a vegetarian or a carnivore? Or do you eat paper to keep your cardboard structure strong? What would you do? Would you want people to know about you or would you hide to keep yourself secret? The title for the story could be A day in the life of a Skilly. Each child could write a different story as each child has made an individual Skilly.
If you wanted to develop children's collaborative 
writing skills you could suggest that Skillies travel in groups of two or three and look after each other and have fun together. If a group of children have produced a large creature they could work together on writing a story about what happens in school after they have gone home and the creature prowls through the school keeping guard. If the children take to this task you could encourage them to produce their writing using desktop publishing software and include digital photographs of the Skillies they have made.