In December we sent a box to each of six Somerset primary schools. About £500 of kit in each one. Around twenty books for the library, including Dog Man, Investigators, and There's a Troll on the Toilet, the kind of titles children reach for first. Roughly £100 of board and card games. A Yoto Mini with a case and a stack of audiobooks loaded onto it.
The games were a deliberate mix. Story Cubes, Bananagrams, and The Lost Words Card Game for the children who are comfortable with words; Dixit and Dobble Kids for the ones who are not yet. Letterjam, Outfoxed, and So Clover! are all quick pickups that an adult can run for a group of six without needing to memorise the rules.
On the Yoto side we loaded audiobooks the children were likely to recognise (Harry Potter, Paddington, Famous Five, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Roald Dahl, The Gruffalo's Child) alongside a few they might not have met yet (The Wild Robot, Dave the Pigeon, How to Train Your Dragon). We also included a handful of factual audiobooks by Yoto, including one on the human body that we are told gets played more often than everything else put together.
Alongside the boxes, we invited the same six schools to enter our first creative writing competition. Four of the six came in. The theme was “Magic on your doorstep.” We made it deliberately age-scalable: Reception could draw a picture; Year 1 and 2 wrote a sentence or two and illustrated it; Year 3 and 4 wrote a paragraph; by Year 5 and 6 it was a short scene, with vocabulary and structure actually marked.
Nobody was marked on handwriting. That was the rule we set ourselves first. A child who is a brilliant imaginer and a messy writer had to have the same chance as a child with neat handwriting and no ideas.
The winners from each year group at each school got a £20 National Book Token. We wanted every class to have its own winner. That way every child would know the winner from their class by name, probably sitting at the table next to them. The award was meant to feel close.
The writing that came back was roughly what you would expect: trolls, talking cats, grandmothers in peculiar places. We enjoyed reading every entry.
We are running Magic on your doorstep again this coming Christmas. If you run a Somerset primary and would like your school added to the invitation list, tell us when you register. There are things we would do differently on the second round, and we will say so when we get there.