Teaching writing has always been challenging. Now, teachers and school leaders are telling us that writing has been even harder hit by school disruptions. I'm sure many of you are now searching for ways to close the learning gap.
As a former school leader, I've spent the last 10 years working closely with schools to identify the key elements that drive pupil engagement and attainment in writing. What started in my classroom has now developed into a solution used by tens of thousands of teachers around the world to accelerate writing progress. Pobble.com
I firmly believe that the strategies outlined here will support schools identifying writing as an area of focus and looking to raise writing attainment. They are designed to complement and enhance your current approach to teaching writing and lead to improved writing progress post school disruption. I hope you find them useful:
There's so much incredible content available out there, made by brilliant teachers like you. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel! Use high-quality, pre-made content to save you time. On Pobble you'll find editable, curriculum mapped lessons, ideal for intervention programmes or whole-class teaching. They cover a range of topics and genres and will save you heaps of time, so you can focus on what matters most - teaching.
Covering all the key writing curriculum objectives is no mean feat, there are so many to include in your plans! A daily writing routine encourages positive habits for your pupils and allows you to structure your time effectively, focusing on a specific area each day. Pobble's short, objective-based lessons align with the word, sentence and punctuation strands of the curriculum. They're a perfect way to cover key objectives as part of your daily writing routine.
Children love to look at other children’s work. It gives them the confidence to try new things, exposes them to different writing styles and gives them lots of ideas to 'magpie' for their own work. The Pobble Writing Bank contains thousands of examples of children's work, searchable by age, genre and topic. It's a fantastic source of inspiration and ideas for you and your pupils!
Creating opportunities for young writers to request and receive feedback is crucial. By responding to this feedback and editing and improving their work, they gain self-awareness of their writing skills and develop their metacognitive skills. Pobble's self and peer assessment tools have been developed specifically for writing. They contain genre-based success criteria for all ages and levels, making it simple for you to enable self and peer assessment for any writing task. Read more about pupil assessment tools here.
We all know children put more effort into their writing when they have a purpose to write. An effective way of doing this is to provide them with an audience for their work. Pobble provides an opportunity for pupils to publish their writing to a worldwide audience. They can receive feedback from their parents and a safe, global community of children and teachers all around the world! This builds confidence in their writing and motivates them to keep improving their work. Read more about publishing here.
Long blocks of writing can be challenging for children. You can develop their writing stamina by providing regular, short opportunities to write for pleasure. Pobble's Quick Writes and popular Pobble 365 lessons offer many opportunities for short, engaging, daily writing activities. As well as increasing their enjoyment of writing, they are ideal for improving children's writing stamina and fit perfectly into a daily writing routine.
It's important to create opportunities for independent learning so children can refine and reflect on their writing skills. Our Pobble News resource is perfect for homework. It offers writing activities linked to current child-friendly news stories. You’ll find non-fiction writing prompts, discussion pieces and fun facts to prompt some brilliant writing. The best thing is, we create a new one for you each week!
You can raise the profile of writing across your school by celebrating your young writers through assemblies, newsletters and displays. Pobble provides you with printable celebration resources, such as I'm a Published Author lanyards, stickers, and certificates. These make it fun and easy to regularly celebrate your young writers' achievements with the whole school community.
9. Show progress over timeOf course, you know how your pupils are progressing. However, we all know you will need to demonstrate this to others. With Pobble, monitoring progress is simple. Each pupil has an online evidence bank containing all of their writing, which stays with them as they move through school. With all your pupils' work available in one place you can easily demonstrate the children's progress over time.
Moderation is a great way to benchmark and provide ongoing CPD. However, there have been few opportunities to moderate writing together recently. Pobble has been working with schools and Local Authorities to develop an online moderation tool. With this, you can moderate writing collections online on any device, any time. This is ideal for developing internal moderation, school-to-school, and supporting statutory moderation requirements.
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