For many children, drawing the moment they remember best is a key to remembering words and phrases from the script that can broaden their own vocabulary.

Working with the children to display all their best remembered moments in chronological order encourages them to think about the structure of the story.

Drawing maps of the journies that Ivan goes on and the environments that he navigates has proved useful to schools both as a springboard for imaginative work and as a starting point for a more formal geography exercise.

Physically re-creating the events of the play has helped many children discover the narrative structure - the cliff-hangers, the moments of tension, the repetitions.

Schools have made use of the physical approach as a route to developing original dialogue and other writing.

Diary writing, from one of the characters' point of view, and imagining different endings have been particularly fruitful exercises.

The themes and meaning of the story are explored by small groups of children re-enacting incidents from the play in their own words. The scenes are used to develop the children's ability to articulate how it feels to be a particular character. Those watching are asked to interpret what they think is happening by describing how the characters look and what the characters do.

How does Ivan feel when his father falls ill? Why do Ivan's brothers not like him? Why does he like Yelyena so much? Why does she like him?

The production style is representational rather than realistic - lots of ribbons and recycled umbrellas. Characters are essentially represented through body shape and quality of voice.

How can children use their bodies to be old or frail or strong or brave? How will their body shapes affect their voices? How do different body shapes make them feel? What body shape do you use to represent an animal? And - a different question - how else could we represent different characters in a play - The Firebird, the Water Snake, the Raven?

Some of the most creative work that schools do revolves around unanswered questions in the play. For example, how did Lodgoth capture and control the Firebird? Who is the Wise Woman of the Wild Woods? What exactly did the brothers get up to in Valpurgis? What did Vanya the Wolf do next?

We've built a number of larger projects with schools around unanswered questions in several of our plays.

We’re often able to answer questions immediately after a performance but schools have then followed this up with e-mail dialogue, developing the children’s IT skills as well as concentrating their minds on particular aspects of the production.

Our post-show question and answer sessions have been used as press-calls for the school magazine.

One school in particular took a very formal approach. The organiser of the event (the headteacher) and some "general public" (children from other years) were interviewed alongside us by a band of well-prepared journalists who wrote up the "press conference" on the school website .