Janet Elvin led her Year 6 group from Gosforth Central Middle School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the cottage’s landscape and imagination walk From a practical point of view it was brilliant - all the materials were ready for us, which was important because we were staying in a youth hostel. The walk was very open-ended. It was well planned and we began to use different aspects of the landscape, focusing on things like a rushing stream, to stimulate discussion and writing. The leaders read us short quotes from the poems and we began to see how Wordsworth had used things he’d seen in his writing. Then we jotted down impressions and ideas using the landscape as inspiration, too.

We’d done nothing about Wordsworth before we came, but the walk stimulated some excellent creative writing. The children found the cottage and museum very exciting - they loved the anecdotes about the way people lived in the past and they were proud of what they wrote. It was so good we’re planning to do it again next year.