Everybody Writes Blog
Welcome to the Everybody Writes weblog, where Anna Loudon, our Project Officer, keeps you up to date with what we’ve been doing and thinking recently.
Books and writing
I was at the Guardian Education Reading for Pleasure seminar yesterday, partly to celebrate World Book Day, and partly to talk to primary teachers about Everybody Writes and other Booktrust projects such as Booktime, Children’s Book Week and giving out our fabulous new leaflet about sharing picture books. This was especially relevant as Lauren Child was the keynote speaker, who was fascinating and talked us through her writing and drawing process for the Charlie and Lola and Clarice Bean books.
Also speaking was the fabulous Prue Goodwin who has been working with our colleagues Katherine and Sasha recently to produce a raft of materials about sharing picture books with Foundation and Key Stage 1 children, including some short films you can see here.
As ever, it was great to talk to teachers in person about encouraging writing in their schools, and I hope that I managed to inspire a few with ideas for creating a book about their school, creating a writing blog for their class or working with their local museum or art gallery to produce writing.
All this talk of sharing books brings to mind many excellent writing projects we’ve heard about where teachers use a book to inspire a variety of exciting writing - for instance, Nevill Road’s Writing about the Iron Man project. It is often the case that schools find their reading results outweigh that of writing. For those schools a book-focused writing project is ideal: the best Everybody Writes projects are ones that build on the existing strengths in the school. What better way to increase the enjoyemnt of writing than by using reading as a way in?
If you’re interested in writing based on reading, think about writing alternative adventures for well-known books like Charlie and Lola and making those into a book; role playing the stories and thinking about alternative endings; adapting stories into plays, writing the scripts and putting the play on, or making the play in a paper theatre; writing diary entries for characters in a well-loved story; writing letters from their perspective to other characters in the story: the opportunities are many.
Everybody Writes, Aye!
Pupils enjoy writing and making "old" documents
A theme that has become quite popular for Everybody Writes projects is pirates - we’ve heard of quite a few nautical writing projects, with plenty of walking the plank, shivering of timbers and eye patches galore. A project I have heard about recently involved the children writing ransom letters after the imprisonment of the headteacher, with other children writing letters asking for the head to be released.
All Saints Primary in Stockport sent us in some great photos of their children’s pirate maps, poems and songs. St James’ Primary told us about writing sea shanties, making a pirate-themed outside writing area, instructions for finding treasure and the creation of a special pirate newsletter that every child took home to show parents at the end of the day.
Using a pirate theme for writing seems to be a popular one for engaging boys. Our recent evaluation report from the University of Sheffield judged Everybody Writes to be excellent at engaging boys in writing; we are happy that the popularity of writing projects such as pirate days, investigating dinosaur bones and blogging about football (to focus on only a few examples) make us an invaluable resource for teachers.
We are all writers - eggs-actly!
St Mary's Primary School in Dorset investigate some impressive giant eggs
Possibly the biggest we've ever seen!
A teacher from St Mary’s Primary School in Dorset has forwarded me these fantastic pictures of their school’s Everybody Writes Day at the end of last year, inspired by the Giant Eggs projects here (and here) on the Everybody Writes website. We especially like that parents were invited to write as part of the day, something we know always seems to amaze children. What? Adults write too? Who would have thought?
One of my favourite projects on the Everybody Writes site is Everybody Writes - Don’t They?, a letter-writing project run by Weston Park Junior School in Southampton. The idea was very simple - for children to write to adults and ask how they used writing in their jobs. The amazement of children on receiving letters back from carpenters, builders and ambulance personnel in their local community, telling them how they used writing every day, was huge.
The idea of teachers and other adults writing alongside children as part of a communal project is a powerful one, and something we discussed at our recent Enthusiast workshops, where part of the days were focused on encouraging teachers to be writers too. Some comments were very revealing - “Now I know how the kids feel when I ask them to write something!”. Having to write creatively really reminds us what we ask of children, and makes us think about the best way to inspire them.
Giant eggs? School books? Mysterious occurrences? It’s just a day in the life of Everybody Writes.
Everybody Writes in the South West
We’ve started this week brilliantly (even if we do say so ourselves) with a great Enthusiast Workshop day at Salisbury City Hall. A lovely group of primary and secondary teachers from across the south west came together to be creative writers themselves with the help of super-duper performance poet Francesca Beard, ate cake and shared the writing projects they’d been doing in schools with us.
We had some great discussions about creative ways to evaluate and document writing projects, with our favourite videographer Sasha Hoare filming the day and showing us a fabulous film at the end of it – proving that filming a day doesn’t have to be onerous – especially when you’ve got a digital video camera.
We also looked at multimedia ways to share childrens’ writing, and shared ideas for school blogs and animation projects among lots of other bits.
We’ve got two more sessions in London and Manchester this week, so even more fun to be had and projects to be planned. The Everybody Writes roadshow is coming to a town near you! Write on.
Writing strategies
This week the Everybody Writes team are out and about, presenting our Guide for local authorities to Primary National Strategies Consultants around the country. Yesterday I was in Peterborough talking to a group about running Everybody Writes projects over a number of schools, and over the next couple of days I’ll be in Kensington and Maida Vale, and Allison is off spreading the word in Bristol and Birmingham. It’s a busy week, and we’re delighted to be reaching people who may have come across Everybody Writes before but aren’t as familiar with how they could think about involving a number of schools in celebrating writing across a wide area.
The BETT show last week was an interesting event and I enjoyed talking to the teachers I met there about Everybody Writes and also the Perform A Poem website, an e-safe site hosted by London Grid for Learning, where London schools can safely share children’s poetry performances. It’s a great site with lots of ideas for running poetry workshops in schools and tips for teachers as well as video of children performing their own poetry. Highly reccommended - have a look and see what you think!
I’m also getting together new content for next month’s web update and so far have some fabulous new case studies to go online, including a great graphic novels project with secondary students. It reminded me how much I’ve always wanted to create a graphic novel myself - the young people’s artwork is truly inspiring. Watch this space for some impressive writing and art crossover!
