Pupils at a Lanarkshire school that work with deaf children have been hard at work creating a new character for a much-loved podcast.
Youngsters at Hamilton School for the Deaf welcomed a special visit from CBeebies writer Jo Hall, who needed their help for her JoJo Gnome's Story Podcast.
Kids took on the roles of researcher, interviewer, presenter, director and sound operator for a short film as part of the project, after seeing their very own Ella the Elf character come to life.
They told how they came up with the musical, maths loving character Ella who wears cochlear implants.
The fantastic programme was put together over two days and in time for Deaf Awareness Week this week (May 2 to May 8).
There is also a BSL signed version of the story, as funding for the project was made available by Creative Scotland.
Jo Hall is a former BBC Learning Senior Producer and has written for CBeebies episodes of Balamory, Me Too, Nina and The Neurons and Molly and Mack. She now writes and produces JoJo Gnome’s Story Podcast, based in Scotland.
The upper primary pupils from Hamilton School for the Deaf decided to make a new deaf character for Jo's podcast.
The two-day workshop was part of an ongoing creative maths based story making project for early years.
And the character will now go on to feature in JoJo Gnome’s Story Podcast, a free story podcast for younger children.
The character is featuring as part of a series of workshops ‘JoJo Gnome Loves Maths’, which aim to make maths accessible through story for early years pupils and their families.
Jo said: “The start of the project for me was speaking to the children about what they wanted a younger audience to know about being deaf.
"Young people are very direct and clear in a way that sometimes adults don’t tend to be, so they knew exactly what they wanted children to be aware of.
"Including most importantly, deaf children are just like other children in most ways except sometimes that some communicate by signing.
"To make the illustrations work we had to take other things into consideration, when making Ella, like the fact she had to have two ears and 10 fingers or digits if they wanted her to use British Sign Language.
"It was a real collaboration and the pupils did a brilliant job.”
The school's acting headteacher, Jamie Clark, was delighted his pupils were involved in the project and thought they had really benefited from taking part.
He said: “The character is very creative and imaginative. Whenever you put something to our pupils, it’s fantastic to see the ideas that they come up with."
Jamie added: “I love the fact that she wears cochlear implants as well. I think it’s important to have, to show that that cochlear implants are common and it is great for raising deaf awareness.”
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