Context

St Christopher’s is an average-sized school situated to the east of the town centre. Pupils come from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. The vast majority are from White British backgrounds. The proportion of pupils with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is average. The school holds several awards, including the Basic Skills Quality Mark, the Healthy Schools Award, the Activemark and the Eco-Schools (Bronze) Award.

A number of children perceive writing to be a ‘chore’, especially boys, and we thought this would be a way to help to change attitudes and demonstrate that writing can be ‘cool’.

Aims & principles

• We wanted to give all members of our school community the confidence, including the ability to take risks and the self belief that they can be a great writer.
• We wanted to ensure that all members of our school community will gain enjoyment from writing.

In Practice

Writing was a major strand in our annual Creative Arts Week which took place in the week commencing 8th June 2009. We had a number of different creative writing ideas taking place throughout the week with further development in the following weeks.

Year 1 worked on a pirate theme to encourage Year 1 boys in particular. We worked with Jan Llewellyn (Stockport Design & Technology Support Teacher) to create pirate outfits and a pirate ship used to spark children’s imagination. We also incorporated role play; speaking and listening; art; design and technology and writing.

Poet and writer Mike Garry worked with the KS2 children, teachers and teaching assistants on the Monday, exploring language and poetry - leading to children writing their own poems.

Parents and Middays were invited to hear recitals of children’s poems and, with the help of the older children, write their own poems.

Year 6 designed and wrote their own books aimed at Reception children and hosted a teddy bears picnic for the reception class and their teddies.

Outcomes

We feel that we have built confidence and self belief so that all members of our school community start to see themselves as writers. We have also raised attainment in writing across the school.

We are pleased to see that Year 1 boys in particular seem more motivated to write, and attainment in boys writing at KS1 has risen.

Children seem more motivated to write their own poems.

Year 6 enjoyed designing and writing their own books.

Attitudes and attainment after the project

The funding enabled us to work with outside people such as Mike Garry, the poet and Jan Llewellyn, Design Tech advisory Teacher, both of whom were inspirational. It was fantastic to see parents, staff and children all writing their own poems and being proud of their achievements.

“We wrote a poem about ‘Sand in your Pants’ together and it is great!” — James and Bobby, Reception

“Challenging but rewarding! I didn’t think I could do it, but I was quite proud of my result.”  — Holly, student teacher

Legacy

We will continue to emphasise the ‘enjoyment’ aspect of writing – writing is not a chore but can be great fun, with writing for different purposes and audiences.

We will encourage more parents to get involved with writing and supporting their children’s writing. We are going to hold a Parents Writing Information Evening in the Spring 2010 term.

A parent suggestion was to run a ‘Family Writing Workshop’ which we have now included in our School development Plan, and intend to hold in the Spring 2010 Term.

Resources

• £50 for pirate ship plus various small amounts of funding for different classes.
• £300 payment for the professional poet
• 3 days staff time for planning

Final thought

If we were to run a similar project again we would make sure to schedule a whole week for the activities and try to ensure that other events did not clash with it.

We had dedicated a week to this project but there were a number of other demands on time which arose that same week, such as an afternoon Sports Festival at the local High School, the PTA barbeque and more. These diversions tended to slow the momentum / divert enthusiasm from the project.

---

Comments on We can all be writers

Be the first to comment on this project