After a long time in the making, my Time Traveller version of Sir William Petty is at last ready for schools. He’s been gently tested twice at Skipton Castle, tweaked, then dropped in at the deep end (of time?) in a Halifax school a couple of weeks ago, where I worked with the whole school, concentrating on Key Stage 2.

As I develop him further I will come up with formats for differing age groups and numbers of classes. I envisage he will work with anything from one class to the whole school, rather like my pirate character. The fewer the classes, however, the more each individual child will get out of their interaction with the character.

All of my other characters believe they’re still in their own time, which makes this character a new experience for me – Sir William is the first who can notice and directly address the present day rather than talking solely about his own world. It is a delight to see the children first realising how much I don’t know about their world despite the fact I seem very well informed about all sorts of matters, then struggling to work out how exactly they can satisfactorily explain their own world to me.

If you want to know more about Sir William the Time Traveller, please click here. And if you want him to visit your school, do please get in touch.