You can raise the profile of writing across your school by celebrating your newly published young authors through assemblies, newsletters and displays. A Pobble display is an excellent way to showcase children's published work, creativity and effort to the school community. Pobble loves to make things easier for fellow teachers, so we’ve produced some fun and engaging resources that will make creating a Pobble celebration display for your classroom or school super-easy for you. Below are ten hints, tips and tricks (as well as links to our display templates) that save you just that little bit of time and allow you to get the most out of your display.
Find a suitable display board in your class, corridor or school hall and prepare the background. Bright material such as a flat bed sheet or plastic tablecloths from the pound shop work well and don’t fade! Try and choose a display board that is at children’s eye level — chances are they won’t pay much attention if they can’t see it properly.
Print off all our display elements. Laminate (optional), cut out and blu-tack in position. Blu-tacking before stapling gives you the option to make adjustments, swap things around and straighten them out before committing to a staple! A spirit level or even the app on your phone comes in handy for straightening things up!
The main element of your display is of course, the children’s writing. We recommend selecting some ‘Writers of the Week’ or ‘Star Writers’ every week. Pin their writing on the display. A clothes peg or bulldog clip pinned or glued to the wall means you can easily change the writing every week. Keep it central and make a fuss! They’re your Star Writers! Print off our Published Author lanyards so they can wear one for the week and feel proud of their achievements. Try to ensure that all children in your class get published at least once each term.
A personalised display can be more meaningful to children. Include photos (permissions allowing) of the newly published authors next to their writing to give them an extra bit of fame. Plus, kids love to pose for a snap!
Get the children involved in the decision-making by letting them choose who gets published each week. Perhaps select a shortlist to be read out to the class and have them vote on their favourites. This will encourage improvement, healthy competition and keep all the class involved!
Include a world map on your display. These can be picked up cheaply from pound shops. This gives the children a great perspective of how far Pobble’s global audience reaches and shows them that their writing can be viewed outside the classroom. You could use sticky dots or pins to identify the countries where you receive comments on their writing. Children love to see where in the world their work is being viewed!
Visitors to your classroom will be keen to see your class’s work, but may not always get the chance to read the writing in full and feedback their thoughts to the children. Use our ‘Read our writing on pobble.com’ signs next to the writing to encourage others to visit your Pobble class account and leave a comment.
Visiting pobble.com regularly to see how many views and comments your class has had is a brilliant way to maintain the excitement around writing in your class. Print and laminate our comment and view counters and add them in prominent positions on your display. Children will adore checking in routinely, filling in the numbers and watching the views and comments climb!
Children love to have a role. Assign jobs to children in your class (such as checking the number of views and comments on the site and filling in the counters) or select a Mini Pobble Champion each week. This will keep the class involved and make others that aren’t the Star Writer that week feel involved and important, too. Find a Mini Pobble Champion guide here.
Get your newly published authors to reflect. How does it feel? You’ll find a template in our pack so your children can write down their thoughts and feelings and share it with others in the class — or they can even post them on the display for the whole school to see!
Your awesome, new Pobble display will help you share your amazing class writing with your school community, but don’t forget to share beyond your school via social media, school newsletters or on your school’s website. This will ensure plenty of visitors to your class’s writing. Make sure you encourage them to leave a comment or two! We've got ready-made images to share on social media and your school website too. Find them here.
Don't forget to tag us. We'll share with our community of thousands of teachers around the world.
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