As a practitioner of philosophy with children, I aspire to offer activities as rich and challenging as those you’ve written about. And while I work with much younger children who are a lot less philosophically sophisticated, I do explore similar themes and ask the same reflective, evaluative and metacognitive questions that you mention.

I see how the individual writing tasks you assign can help to achieve a delicate balance between collaborative and independent thinking processes – a balance that tends to be strongly weighted towards collaboration in the dialogue-driven enquiries that I facilitate. I have the impression that many children find writing onerous. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has had success in incorporating a significant element of independent writing into their philosophy programs for primary school children.