Essex Life

Corey the Cautious Chicken, Bella the Beautiful Bunny and Bracken the Bashful Bat.

These are just a few of the characters to have been created at a special Storytelling and Cartoon Workshop held at the Brightlingsea Infant School.

The event was designed to help parents develop their writing and storytelling skills and to encourage them to work with their children to create their very own bedtime stories.

Handy hints were the order of the day

In the first part of the workshop, the mums and dads were given hints and tips on how to create dynamic characters, and then how to develop them into exciting storylines.

Giving the advice was professional storyteller and performance poet Chris Bennett, who was keen to point out how easy it is to come up with your own stories: "It's not a scary thing to sit and write a story," he explained. "There are simple ways to get ideas for a character and for things to put into your story.

"Children can come up with loads of ideas and you can just go with their sometimes daft and random ideas, which you can put into your story and just have lots of fun."

Armed with Chris's advice, the parents were given the challenge of writing their own short story, using their own character and at least one character from the BBC RaW's 'Max and Lara's Amazing Travelling Space Circus' series.

It was an opportunity to both learn and have fun

To help them in this task, they were joined by their children and together they worked on turning their story into a colourful cartoon strip.

For parent Helen, who along with her daughter Bracken devised a story about a bat that couldn't sleep, the day was an opportunity to try something new: "I doodle at home and like to draw little characters, " said Helen. "But I've often thought what it would be like to write a story about it."

Simon, who with his daughter Lea, created 'Lea the Lightning Lima', was also keen for his story to have a moral message to it.

"I think stories should have a moral," he explained. "If you read stories to children that have morals and a sense of right and wrong in them, then hopefully they'll remember it for later on and take it on with them."

The workshop was a collaboration between Brightlingsea Infant School, Tendring's Family Learning Curriculum team and the BBC RaW campaign.

You too can have a go at writing your own short children's story by entering BBC RaW's Short Story competition. The closing date for entries is Thursday, 31, January and you can get more details and entry forms by visiting the BBC RaW website.