Do you spend hours trying to find examples of writing to use in lessons, only to end up writing your own? Like many teachers, I used to want to demonstrate features of a text or give my pupils something to edit and improve so I spent an age writing various pieces to suit all the needs of my learners. Familiar? This was me before I discovered the Writing Bank on Pobble! WIth a Pobble account, you gain access to the world's largest bank of children's handwritten writing examples!
Once I had been introduced to Pobble, I tried using a couple of texts from the platform and the reaction from my class was incredible! Instantly, they connected with the writer because they knew it was someone real and even better, someone of their age who made similar errors to them. As we deconstructed some of the pieces, they naturally found themselves both editing and improving the writing through high-quality discussion and noting down words and phrases they quite liked the sound of to use in their own work. It was magic and… I had my Sundays back!
Since then, I’ve found many different ways of using other children’s writing to engage, support and improve my own pupils’ writing. To get you started, here are a few ideas of how you can use texts in your lessons:
Using this piece of writing opens up a whole host of learning opportunities — not just one lesson either!
Ideas for using this piece:
Using this piece of writing opens up a whole host of learning opportunities — not just one lesson either!
Ideas for using this piece:
Using this piece of writing opens up a whole host of learning opportunities — not just one lesson either!
Ideas for using this piece:
As in most cases, when you are marking the books, there will usually be a handful of children who have not demonstrated a particular objective that you had either focused on that week or are expecting them to now use in their writing by now.
An example may be fronted adverbials. Find a text that either demonstrates examples of fronted adverbials and discuss with the children how they are used in a small group activity OR find one that does not and focus on improving this particular piece of writing by adding appropriate fronted adverbials. In the same session, ask the children to return to their own writing from the day before and notice what they could add. i.e. fronted adverbials. They can use what they have just discussed to edit and improve their own writing. Of course, this can apply to most objectives.
Usually, we ask the class to think of as many words and/or phrases to describe perhaps an image or a setting etc and draw upon the senses to help with this. This is great as it gives children an opportunity to show you what they know already and to share those ideas with peers. What we do next is model to them better examples that we want them to use which then builds on that existing knowledge. What I do now is actually give only a few of my own ideas and ask the children to explore other pieces from fellow pupils to ‘magpie’ from them instead. This is a much more fun and engaging way for children to expand their vocabulary.
As you can see, there are so many different learning opportunities to be had by using writing examples on the Pobble platform. Here, I have only selected three pieces so imagine how much there is to learn knowing that there are hundreds of thousands of pieces to use!