Ali Findlayson is Head of Primary at Queens British Grammar School, Estepona. Here she shares how she ran a Pobble whole school writing day and how it can motivate your young writers and build a culture of excitement around writing in your school.
Little did I know when I signed up for a free webinar from Pobble that it would mark the beginning of an exciting writing journey. The webinar promised to share seven ideas to inspire our class to write, but it delivered so much more. Having been loyal users of Pobble 365 for many years and witnessing how children responded eagerly to the writing prompts, we were keen to explore ways to use Pobble to further foster excitement around writing.
Like many schools, writing regularly features on our school development plan, and following the challenges of COVID-19, we were keen to enhance our approach. The webinar shared some brilliant free ideas we could implement immediately into our classrooms and introduced us to the benefits of a Premium Pobble school subscription for our Primary teaching team.
Investing in the premium subscription was a no-brainer for our school. It offers excellent value and grants our team unlimited access to all of Pobble's writing resources, saving us valuable time as staff. The children adore using Pobble, and there's always a buzz around writing when we do. After a straightforward setup, our teachers delved into Pobble Premium and explored the range of lessons to support their English planning.
Having witnessed the engagement from the children, we discussed as a staff how we could capitalise on this newfound excitement for writing to further engage all of our students. Inspired by the Pobble blog post titled 'How to run a whole school writing day', we embarked on creating our Queens British Grammar Pobble whole school writing event! The idea was to utilise one of the Pobble 365 images alongside ideas from the Pobble webinar to deliver a whole school Pobble lesson.
Just as our teachers began planning how to adapt the activities for our students of different ages, an email from Anna at Pobble arrived, announcing the launch of Pobble's new differentiated lessons! The timing could not have been more perfect! These lessons offer the option to toggle from the standard Pobble 365 lesson to a simplified version or a more complex one. This feature was a game-changer for us, not only saving the teachers even more precious time but also providing us with the ideal platform to ensure we could impact writing across the Primary phase.
The plans were made, and the stage was set. Our exciting Pobble day began with a whole school assembly where we introduced the image of 'The Little Astronaut' to the children and read through the three differentiated story starters. We discussed the questions prepared by Pobble with the children and shared lots of ideas and thoughts about them.
Brimming with inspiration, the students then returned to their classrooms and set about producing their masterpieces. The slides within the Pobble 365 presentations supported the children with sentence starter ideas and even a bespoke word bank linked to the image. Throughout the day, the teachers used their new super sentence boards, an idea inspired by Pobble's webinar, to capture the children's fantastic ideas.
At the end of the day, everyone reconvened to share some of our brilliant writing. We were thrilled with the outcome and quality of the work produced. We also began to create our whole school celebration display, recognising the work of many of our students while also showcasing what writing looks like across our whole school (perfect for upcoming inspections).
The day concluded with us awarding some Pobble certificates to our writing stars, which were included in a lovely pack of writing resources we received upon subscribing. We then paid a quick visit to the Pobble 365 calendar to check out which image we might explore next and build excitement for another motivating writing day.
I'd have no hesitation in recommending Pobble to other schools. It's impactful, motivating, and so simple to introduce. I hope that our journey with Pobble inspires you to give a whole school writing day a try too!