The Pobble blog

Do you know a child that struggles to put pencil to paper? Motivating them and getting their imaginations fired up is often the hardest part. We can offer them hooks, prompts and story starters, but something often overlooked is real-life examples of work from children of their own age.

Children love to look at other children’s work. Instantly, they connect with the writer because they know it’s someone real and even better, someone of their own age. It provides real motivation to write.

Children are naturally more creative than adults, their imaginations are incredible! Their ideas are weird, wonderful and wacky and offer a great starting place for other children to find inspiration for their writing. If only there a was a huge library full of young authors’ work, a bank of ideas and inspiration for children to search through… On Pobble there is! It’s the world’s largest bank of children’s handwritten work and the best thing is, it’s completely free to access!

All of the writing on Pobble is categorised into age group, genre and topic, effectively making it a search engine of children’s writing. There are so many learning opportunities to be had by using the writing examples on Pobble; many ways of using other children’s writing to engage, support, inspire and improve writing.

Here are six ways to inspire children’s writing with real-life examples from their peers, whether you’re in the classroom or at home:

• Topic research  - Searching for writing on Pobble allows children to take responsibility for their learning and discover texts relevant to their learning needs. They can easily and independently discover examples and information about topics they are interested in. 
• Writing comparison - Viewing handwritten work from others allows children to compare it to their own. Seeing writing from others who potentially make similar spelling, punctuation or grammar errors to them is a much-needed confidence boost. They identify with the handwriting, it may not be as neat or tidy as they see in other situations, but it’s real and reassuring.
• Exposure to different styles of writing - It’s essential that children learn to convey their writing in a manner that is effective and meaningful to their audience. Whether it’s a narrative, persuasive, or descriptive piece, being able to view different examples allows children to identify the styles and features of the text for different genres.
• Finding ideas and inspiration - Magpie-ing ideas is something that should be encouraged. Children can search through whatever age group, topic or genre they like and note down vocabulary, phrases, sentence structures or anything else they liked to use in their own piece of writing.  
• Editing and improving - The wide variety of pieces on Pobble allows children to deconstruct and up-level writing. Selecting a piece for them to edit and improve provides a great opportunity for high-quality discussion and encourages them to pick out improvements and edits they could make. We find children think much more carefully about editing others’ work and ultimately develop better editing skills to take and use on their own writing.
• Show them ‘What a Good One Looks Like’ - viewing WAGOLLs and model texts is an important part of learning to write. They are ‘good’ examples of writing that set a standard that children can aim to achieve in their own work. Good WAGOLLs aren’t usually easy to come by though. Teachers often end up writing their own or use one from a textbook. Pobble eliminates that need! Having a great example to inspire them will help children create their own original ideas and encourage them to improve their writing.
  
  

On Pobble, you’ll find the world’s largest bank to showcase children's handwritten work, sorted by age, genre and topic. Ideal for exemplification, finding ideas and lesson inspiration. Plus Pobble 365 - One picture, five related writing activities every single day. 

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