Night Zookeeper Blog

Sky Kids has commissioned 10 episodes of animated series Night Zookeeper for 2019. Night Zookeeper, created by Wonky Star, is a UK-based children’s brand, which has grown organically over the last six years from a primary teaching resource. Their website, nightzookeeper.com, is used in thousands of schools across the world to inspire children to invent their own magical animals, and then write stories about them. The animated series will invite children throughout the UK to participate by creating characters or background designs and suggesting plot points and dialogue for the show.

Just in time for World Book Day, we’re thrilled to announce that the Night Zookeeper Book Series is now fully available for purchase on our shop. We know many of you have been patiently waiting for the third book to become available. You can access all of the books alongside other fun merchandise by visiting our official shop.

Happy New Year! 🎉 We’ve been working really hard all year and wanted to share all of the things we’ve been up to in 2019. This year has been full of magic and great memories. It has been such a transformative year that rather than simply listing out all of our adventures, we are breaking with tradition, and have instead produced a beautiful infographic.

The team here at Night Zookeeper is delighted to be giving primary school children across the UK a unique opportunity to use a new (and free!) website to create characters for a soon-to-launch animated TV series in a world first. Of course, Night Zookeeper is already well-known to school children aged seven and above as an award-winning digital platform that encourages literacy and writing, but soon it’ll also be an animated series on Sky Kids!

With one week left to go of our yearly World Creative Writing Month competition, we have already exceeded three million published words, produced by students around the world! Visit the latest WCWM18 league table by clicking the image below…

Starting in September 2019, we will be embarking on an exciting US Tour, aiming to visit as many schools as possible in three months!!!

In September 2018, Colt Technology Services partnered with Night Zookeeper to sponsor annual licenses to the nightzookeeper.com platform so that classrooms all across the UK could benefit from our literacy program. The impact has been immense with more students than ever in the UK being able to access the Night Zookeeper literacy platform, which is proven to improve the reading and writing skills of primary-age children.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Night Zookeeper. This blog post has been written to help you get to grips with nightzookeeper.com and give you support throughout your 14-day trial.

Night Zookeeper, the fun creativity website, SKY TV animated series, and popular chapter books; will be hosting a free magical interactive experience at Chessington World of Adventures Resort in February half term (February 15-23).

We’ve launched an exciting new initiative, which enables teachers to book live writing lessons with the Night Zookeeper via video chat. An experienced Night Zookeeper educator is ready and waiting to connect with your class via Google Hangouts, Skype, or any other live video software that you use in school.

As you may have seen, we recently launched a new look for the Animal Dens (where each animal lives) in Night Zookeeper. This aims to make it simpler for your child to use and to give them more choice in the activities they do. However, we know that with any change, it can take a little getting used to so we’ve put this guide together to help anyone who is wondering how to use it. Don’t worry, all the same features are still there!

We’re really excited to be attending ISTE conference in Chicago this year. I’m writing this post at the end of day 1 at the conference and we have had an awesome day and met some incredible educators and colleagues! Here are a few of our highlights from our first day…

Are your children newly remote learning or homeschooling due to recent restrictions? Ignite their creativity this lockdown, with Night Zookeeper! 🎨 This time last year, our very own author Joshua Davidson and the Night Zookeeper team were invited to host an interactive experience at Chessington World of Adventures Resort! Josh and the team gave children the chance to enter the Night Zoo and invent their own unique magical animals through nightzookeeper.com! 🐘

We are very excited about a new project that will be starting September 3rd, organised by Sean Forde, a Technology Teacher at Chadwick International School in Korea. Utilising Flipgrid, classes from around the world will take part in the creation of a specially produced Night Zookeeper theater performance!

We make sure students are able to easily join in with a variety of engaging writing challenges, competitions, and resources throughout the year. If you are interested in gamified learning, edtech, creative writing, and inspiring confidence, and a love of reading in your primary-aged students, check out our calendar of events below.

We’re delighted to announce our partnership with the wonderful Fliplearn Kids. They are dedicated to enhancing children’s education and opportunities through the use of technology. You can find out more about Fliplearn Kids on their website here.

On nightzookeeper.com, we are always looking for new ways to make writing fun for kids. That’s why throughout the school year we run lots of fun competitions to get students to practise all kinds of writing as well as to help them learn about different subjects.

Night Zookeeper has joined forces with Amazon to offer an exclusive educational Alexa Skill for its Amazon Kids+ service. Called Night Zookeeper Write and Draw, it launches in the UK alongside a funky new Echo Dot Kids speaker.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve launched some awesome new features to help children that are still developing their reading and writing skills.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve teamed up with our friends at Times Tables Rock Stars to allow students the chance to collect these fun Night Zookeeper characters!

We’re excited to be attending Bett 2019 at the ExCel London from January 23rd to 26th! Come visit our stand to get a special free trial of our website nightzookeeper.com, an educational platform that is proven to raise the writing attainment of primary school students.

We’re reprinting our first book “Night Zookeeper: The Giraffes of Whispering Wood”. If you didn’t know already, we love featuring our children’s work – wherever we can! So we decided our reprint would be the perfect opportunity to feature some new writing from our Night Zookeeper Writers on platform! So, we set out a very special Star Writing Challenge. For this Star Writing, we challenged children to create a new magical animal and write a story about them. They had to write a minimum of 100 words. The winning stories would be chosen to be published in our reprint!

We were very excited to attend a very special screening of the animated Night Zookeeper series at the BAFTA Theatre in London on Saturday March 16th. At a packed-out event, children were able to watch the first four episodes of the Night Zookeeper TV series currently showing on Sky Kids.

Today we have launched our new awards for writing! Students will now not just be rewarded for how much writing they do, but for all the different types of writing they produce.

We’re excited to tell you about new features that have just been added to nightzookeeper.com! Students and teachers can now upload writing and pictures to nightzookeeper.com. From the ‘create’ button at the top of the menu, students just need to press ‘upload’ and either take a picture of their writing, or add the picture via the photo gallery, or a file if using a computer.

Do your students love Night Zookeeper? Are you looking for new opportunities to stretch their creativity? Would your students love to be part of a hit SKY animated TV show? If so, then we’ve got an amazing opportunity for you this year!

With the launch of nightzookeeper.com 2.0, we added our newest feature, short writing challenges, which are perfect for independent learning. These new writing challenges are all focused on helping to improve the spelling, grammar, and vocabulary of students. They are all automatically assessed by our smart algorithm, so you don’t have to moderate any of the writing that students produce. You can simply check in on their performance on your dashboard results table.

We’re working on lots of exciting updates to our website at the moment. Here is a summary of what to expect during the next couple of months

We are thrilled to be working with Picturehouse on a series of family-friendly workshops. Upcoming Dates: Cinema City Picturehouse, Norwich on Sat 27th April at 10.30 am and 2 pm Picturehouse at FACT, Liverpool on Sat 4th May at 10.30 am and 1.30 pm

We’re excited to announce we’ve added new learning games to nightzookeeper.com! The foundation of all great writers is their broad and rich vocabulary. Our new games help children to learn thousands of new words through exciting, personalised activities and games, that feature the animals they create!

We have an exciting new feature to share with you! We now have thousands of new interactive challenges available on the Night Zookeeper platform! These challenges cover all required learning for ages 5-12+.

Book 2 in the Night Zookeeper series, ‘The Lioness of Fire Desert’ is out now and available for purchase.

Our community of Night Zookeeper teachers is some of the most awesome people around! Follow some of our official Night Zookeeper Teacher Ambassadors below to see how they are using Night Zookeeper and developing a love of writing in their class.

In light of the recent developments surrounding Coronavirus and potential school closures, we wanted to help support families struggling to provide educational activities for their children. For the children, we wanted to provide them with a creative outlet to express their feelings during a complicated time. We understood that having to stay at home and not see friends, family and loved ones could feel lonely for them. However, by staying home, it helped to make sure other people who need help can get it. That’s why in partnership with IMM’s Care to Create and printed.com, we set out a very special Star Writing Challenge.

We’re excited to launch a ‘Writing Mentors’ scheme with Colt Technology Services (the same company that has kindly sponsored access for selected classes in the UK). How does it work? Each month, we’ll send class blogs to volunteers at Colt. They will spend designated time leaving helpful, encouraging comments on writing produced by your students.

At Night Zookeeper, it’s no secret that we champion creative writing. We’ve known for some time about the importance creative writing has on making children flourish. The earlier a child starts writing, the better! Recently, we read a brilliant article from the National Literacy Trust concerning new research that focuses on the benefits of creative writing for children’s wellbeing during lockdown. According to the study, not only has lockdown inspired a resurgence of children turning to creative writing, but also that this resurgence has provided a pivotal role in children’s wellbeing.

Night Zookeeper named as one of the EdTech50! We are delighted to have been chosen as one of the EdTech50, out of 600 overall applications. The EdTech50 awards recognise products and projects that demonstrate impactful and effective use of Edtech in the UK.

This week, we are challenging students to invent a new location for the Night Zoo. They should use their imagination to invent a new environment to fit into the Night Zoo map as seen above.

We recently had great fun with a group children from St Mary Magdalen’s Catholic Primary School in Mortlake when we joined them on a visit to a BAFTA and Emmy award-winning animation studio where they became animators for the day and saw their drawn creations come to life.

Today is Read a Book Day. We believe that every day should be Read a Book Day but any excuse to grab a book and read is good enough for us! Whether it’s an old favourite that is as comforting as a soft blanket or a new one ready for you to explore and fall in love with, make some time for it today.

World Creative Writing Month was back for another year, starting March 1, 2021. This exciting competition challenged children to write as many stories as possible throughout the month. The very best writing was showcased each week with prizes up for grabs!

Children’s education and media company Night Zookeeper is launching the first book in the world where kids can design and draw the hero! This personalized book is the perfect gift option for the holidays.

We’ve been working incredibly hard this summer to develop a new feature that will save teachers hours of marking and grading time this year.

We are very excited to announce that our free website and teacher/parent guide for the new animated Night Zookeeper TV series is now live! Teachers and parents can give their children the chance to see their creations come to life in an animated series simply by completing creative challenges on the website.