I invited children to consider things they would like to persuade someone to gift them (a thing, their time or an experience). Careful consideration was given to costs with our focus being on things that are ‘freebies’ as opposed to expensive unattainable items. The design of the lesson was interesting and emerged through a whole class discussion. Children had indicated that they favoured a mini-lesson in this area so we invented it together! I think it worked well, and really forced them to consider the nature of the potential requests they were making.
At the end of the session, I taught the children a technique for helping them to choose the one final idea they wished to take forward called, Let’s rank! We discussed the criteria we wanted to use to simply evaluate each idea and came up with desire (how much we really wanted the change, experience or gift we listed) and likelihood (how likely we were to have our request granted). Pupils collated their favourite ideas from across the two Generating Ideas mini-lessons (Make a change! and Spectrum of a gift) into ‘A top-five list‘. Having done that, we assigned a number of hearts for desire and a number of ticks for likelihood (a maximum of three for each) to help establish which idea should be taken forward.
We’ve given ourselves the weekend to mull over our shortlist and on Monday each of us will make our final choice and begin planning/drafting our letters.
Having spent several days studying the genre and coming up with our product goals (see below), today it was time to start generating some ideas for our letters.
What a range of change!
In this session, using a mini-lesson idea (Make a Change!) from The Big Book Of Writing Mini-lessons, the children generated scores of unique ideas. Here are some of my favourites:
Ideas for changes at home
Have my own TV in my bedroom
Change my bedtime to 8.45pm so I can watch Tracy Beaker: The Next Step
Get a bigger dining table
Be responsible for taking care of the strawberries
Go shopping on my own
Get my own bedroom
Have some of my own TV time
More storage in the house
Visit our house in Peterborough
Go to bed earlier (7pm)
Get more responsibility for jobs around the house (hoovering)
Get rid of the bunk beds
Ideas for changes at school
Have juice in our water bottles
Change the end of the school day to 2.45pm
Be able to choose our desserts
Do more coding lessons
Have a class pet
Get more playground equipment
Play Roblox on the school computers
Watch cartoons while eating our lunch
Have more PE lessons
Change the lunch menu more often
Enter more competitions like the British Library superhero comic one
Come to school by myself
How useful did the children find this mini-lesson?
There were quite mixed reviews for this lesson in terms of its usefulness. Some children found this lesson ‘very useful‘, but several found it to be ‘only a little bit useful‘ or ‘not at all useful‘. The reasons given are insightful. For instance, one girl thought that there were just not many things that she wanted to change at home or school. I should point out though that she still had six of her own ideas for the writing project.
When asked what she wanted a mini-lesson in next, she said, “I don’t know!” This can happen in any writing classroom. I will probably conference with her tomorrow to dig deeper into what she needs. I often ask the children their opinions on the instruction I’m giving them. This way, I can build up a more accurate picture of the collective and individual needs of my pupils.
When we invite children to generate ideas of their own, they develop as writers in profound ways. Missing out this part of the writing process means that children are only ever writing about someone else’s idea. In doing so, we risk alienating children from writing. Far better to give them the strategies and techniques that can support the formulation of their own ideas in a socially sympathetic community of writers. I look forward to seeing which unique idea they each choose to take forward for their persuasive letter.
Why invite your class to make requests and suggestions about their writing lessons? When children are invited to actively participate in how their writing classroom is run, it can improve both their motivation and their writer identity. We know that for children to get the most out of their writing lessons, they need to feel like they have some agency and ownership over what they write and how they write it (Young & Ferguson 2021).
Considering themselves as writers
Last week, I asked my class to think about how they can ‘help me to help them’ by making suggestions and requests for writing lessons. We talked about how the suggestions they make benefit both them and I as fellow writers, as I can build mini lessons, author’s chair sessions and our writing station around their writerly needs.
Spending time considering what might be an appropriate request was important in guiding the class to make manageable suggestions; I didn’t want them to make impractical requests that would potentially need to be denied. In this case, we agreed that all suggestions should be polite, fair, and specific.
This meant that they had already considered what the purpose of an author’s chair session really was and could now think more critically about how they thought that time could be most profitably used. It was interesting to see how, independently of each other, many pupils wanted very similar things from our author’s chair sessions!
The most popular suggestions were:
For me to participate in an Author’s Chair session, so that they could learn more about how to receive feedback from others.
The girl who suggested this said that it would be ‘good to hear what you say when people give you advice.’
For us to have special guests during Author’s Chair, so a wider range of feedback can be heard.
To hold an Author’s Chair session with new audiences – e.g. other classes or year groups.
For us to ensure that Author’s Chair sessions are fair. Some children felt we needed to ensure that a wider range of participants joined in.
This allowed me as a writer-teacher to reflect on my class’ writerly needs. Now that they are building their confidence as writers, they evidently want to share their writing with wider audiences. This was great news.
Suggestions for lessons
Children needed a little more prompting when suggesting mini-lessons to me. I think they are so used to it being me who decides what they need instruction in most. Generally speaking though, their requests fell into two categories:
Mini-lessons on particular writing processes they struggle with. Interestingly, planning seemed to be the most popular request and, incidentally, this is the stage of our Class Writing Project that many of them are currently at!
Mini-lessons related to our current Class Writing Project, Flash Fiction. I could see that they had internalised our product goals for this project, as some of the requests related specifically to how to achieve these.
One boy had recognised from our product goal list that the key moment of our Flash Fiction stories needed to be ‘slowed down’ – he also shared with me that this was something he recognised needing to do in his writing more generally.
From these particular requests, I could tell that my class had developed a strong sense of what our next mini lessons should be in relation to where we were at with our Flash Fiction pieces. However, as well as receiving these more pertinent suggestions, some children made requests that were quite general or not well articulated, revealing their relative inexperience as reflective writers.
Other suggestions
Many children were enthusiastic about the idea of writing competitions, again, informing me that they would like to widen the audiences of their writing.
A few students suggested that we undertake ‘group conferences’, where I work with a small group of them who have a similar need.
Finally, pupils who have developed their own smaller publishing houses for personal projects were keen for opportunities to collaborate with one another.
Moving forward
This mini-lesson allowed me to develop a much greater understanding of my class as writers and what they see as important in writing sessions, namely: the option of sharing their developing pieces with wider audiences regularly and mini-lessons that attend to their most pressing writing needs.
In terms of understanding individual writers, this mini-lesson also gave me the opportunity to see which children were not well-versed in articulating their needs and understanding the bigger picture of our writing projects.
I wrote this for my younger brother’s class because I really wanted them to know all about our cat.
Emma
This blogpost is about a Year 4 child called Emma (pseudonym) and her information text journey.
This is Emma’s ‘speedy book’ which she wrote to use as plan for her more extended information text.
What I liked about using a ‘speedy book’ to plan is that I was able to jot down ideas, but it was almost like publishing because people from the younger classes got to read it.
Emma
Emma planned her information text using a planning strategy called ‘speedy books’. These are small A5 picture books which the children write for younger readers but also to help them organise their thoughts for their more extended pieces. Emma used her speedy book to help her write her final information text. She worked on her piece over the course of about six writing sessions before publishing it (see below).
As you can see, Emma extended and elaborated on what she wrote in her ‘speedy book’ You can also see how the speedy book helped keep her piece focused and cohesive.
How did she work?
As always, we examined mentor texts during our genre-study week. Inspired by one of the texts she found in the KS1 Genre-Booklet Information And Me Books, Emma decided to base her particular information text on her own cat.
Below is a snapshot of some other aspects of Emma’s journey through the writing process encompassing: idea generation, drafting, revising and editing. On these pages, she demonstrates strong feelings of: self-efficacy, agency and self-regulation as she manages her composition. I keep a record of every pupil conference, so I know I didn’t confer with her during this particular project. This is heartening as it indicates her confidence levels were high enough to take her idea all the way through to publication independently. This is great evidence for her writing portfolio.
This collection of photos shows: her original intentions for the piece (her publishing goal), how she used the product goals, where she got her idea from (This is what I do…), the drafting of paragraphs based on the pages in her ‘speedy book’ and the revisions she made on her ‘trying things out’ page.
What information did she add in?
As we read the final published version, we can see that there is a good deal of personal information about the relationship Emma has with her cat. In revealing this to her readers, she also allows us to infer that this might be true about cats’ behaviour in general (sleeping on her bed all night, waiting for her on the stairs to get home, hating water, enjoying playing outside with the other cats, going missing for a few days etc.). We learn more about cats from reading this piece than we did before but we also learn more about Emma too.
On her final page, she decides to share information more explicitly with her reader by sharing a list of items you would need to take care of a cat, and a second list of all the cat breeds that she knows.
Personally, I really enjoyed this style of non-fiction writing with the blend between the more generic and objective information about a topic and the bond that the author has with their chosen subject. As a class teacher, it also enables me to know my children as well as playing a key role in strengthening the writing community as we learn more from each other and about each other’s lives.
What else did I enjoy about this piece?
I really like the poem Emma included at the end of her text (see below). I’m pretty sure she is referencing Puss In Boots from Shrek based on the description, but I really like the way she just alludes to this and doesn’t name him. Instead, she prefers to refer to him as ‘that’ cat. I like to think the spelling of perfect as ‘purfect’ is a deliberate pun although on her ‘trying things out’ page it is circled as a temporary spelling. However, as she took this piece through the editing process, it is perfectly possible that she found the correct spelling then decided to keep it. I’ll have to ask her.
Phoenix is a cat She’s not like that cat She doesn’t wear boots She doesn’t have a sword or a hat But that’s OK She’s purfect the way she is.
I love the vibrancy and celebratory nature of the front cover. Who wouldn’t want to grab it from the shelf and read it? I appreciate the presence of the purple mouse toy which was referenced on page 4. There is further attention to detail with the pumpkins playing the role of the dots on the letter ‘i’ in the words Kitty and Pumpkin. The pattern on the word Kitty is like the fur of her calico cat even down to the distribution of the grey and orange fur (25% coverage) and the white fur (75% coverage). A sublime detail.
Publishing is such an important process for so many reasons, but what I especially like about it is the opportunity it creates for children to be illustrators. It actually opens up a whole new world of potential mini-lessons, especially when making mini-books, and allows children to incorporate their own observations to influence the design decisions they make. Illustrations are part of writing and are another tool we can use to help us share our meaning with our readers.
My favourite thing about this project was that we got to make a ‘speedy book’ first even though it was hard not to add in too much information!
Emma
Final thoughts
It is interesting that Emma already had a lot to say and was almost restricting herself during the planning process. Perhaps this aided her in the organisation and structure of her text and provided a framework for her when she did let her full draft pour out in the next session. What I think is important is that children now have an additional planning strategy in their repertoires and can use it independently when they see fit. And in doing so, they know that they will be producing two books for the price of one.
After a couple of drafting sessions where children have been using their ‘speedy books‘ as plans to write more about their topics, today we began revising.
We concentrated on looking at different ways you might begin a non-fiction text with a mini-lesson titled Intriguing introductions.
One boy’s ‘speedy book’ about The Norris Nuts
As always, I try out the mini-lessons I am going to teach in my own writing journal so I can talk through how I did with the class. Yesterday, I taught a mini-lesson called Write a bit, share a bit and this seemed to improve the overall fluency of the children’s drafting.
The first four paragraphs I drafted in advance, but the final one I decided to do with the children, encouraging them to ask me a few questions to prompt me. When you write something and then share it with an audience, they almost automatically enquire about what you have written, and the kinds of questions they ask often nudge you to think of things that you wouldn’t necesssarily have included under your own steam.
My draft of Soft Play With My Girl (working title)
One boy’s draft of The Norris Nuts
Once you have got your words down then, for me, the fun starts. You get to play around with what you’ve got, add things in, take things out, think about how you want your audience to react, paint with words etc.
Revision is the process when I see the most gains in writing quality, and where I can really focus my teaching on the product goals (either through whole class mini-lessons, or small group/one-to-one pupil conferencing) which were established during our genre-study week.
I picked five typical non-fiction introductions and gave them a whirl
Coming up with ways to start your non-fiction pieces off with a bang is a lot of fun and the children found this lesson really useful. It stimulated a lot of talk and sharing. In fact, today we had a first-timer in our ‘author’s chair’ because he was so happy with what he had produced.
One boy had a go at a couple of openings for his The Norris Nuts information text. He used his ‘trying things out page’.
A class poster showing children a range of options for writing non-fiction introductions.
I must confess that I didn’t know what The Norris Nuts was, but I do now! And that surely is the point of an information text. Coming up, we have a few more sessions allocated for revision before we look to ‘tidy up our pieces’ in preparation for our publishing party.
Today, during the third session of our class project (information texts), we experimented with a planning technique called ‘speedy books’. Having chosen our favourite ideas yesterday, we spent today’s thirty minutes of writing time turning them into mini-books, but with a difference: these were aimed at an EYFS audience.
What was the purpose of planning in this way?
1. To support the organisation and structure of our main texts.
2. To enable children to have the opportunity to plan with simplicity and with a genuine audience in mind.
3. To create an actual text that could be read and enjoyed.
Why not just use a box-up grid, or any other recognised planning technique?
Well, there are many legitimate and useful planning techniques out there, many of which are made available in a Writing for Pleasure classroom. But, since writing can be an idiosyncratic process, the more children know about the different ways that writers plan, the more options they have each time they think about creating a text.
For instance, I always teach children about different drafting approaches one of which is to be a ‘discoverer’ (children write a first draft and then this becomes their plan to write a second draft). And this is essentially what we were doing today; however, I think what separates today’s technique from the others is that in using it the children were creating a complete and authentic text which could be enjoyed by a real audience, and their ‘plan’ now exists as a book in its own right. We will see next week how it supports the drafting of their longer compositions.
How was it taught?
I shared my example with the children (see below) and we discussed it in relation to some simple product goals. It was left up on display, while a few others from The Writing for Pleasure Centre’s EYFS class projects were placed on the children’s tables to act as mentor texts – I often find that, even for a simple text like this one, I need to see examples while I am writing to remind myself exactly what I am aiming for.
Soft Play With My Girl
I created a template with boxes and lines, a decorative spine and a date stamp on a blank front cover. I limited it to five pages. The emphasis was on speed, so I wanted to ensure the format was already taken care of so the children could focus on their text. You could just as easily staple together some blanks pages of A4, but I wanted it to feel a bit special.
There were some brief product goals on the back cover of each mini-book to help to produce a successful example
What did the children create?
Things In The Computer
My Day In The Mosque
Spiders Are Real
Southend!
Were they successful?
These speedy books are peppered with… information! It is clear that children were writing from a position of strength and were able to focus on what they wanted to say on each page. And each of those pages says something new. The books also contain a good deal of subject specific vocabulary and, crucially, they are entirely original in conception reflecting children’s writing realities. Finally, they represent a valuable starting point for a longer draft thus fulfilling the purpose of a plan.
What happened during author’s chair time?
I found that today, perhaps because of the clarity provided by the simplicity of the speedy books, more children were able to participate in the discussion. Also, the comments (likes, suggested changes and questions) were drawing out more information from the author which automatically contributed to the beginning of the revision process. I could see how starting from this low floor would enable everyone to build up their text.
Wasn’t this a waste of time for the more experienced writers though?
Apparently not. I had thought that some children might be put off by the EYFS-nature of the process. However, the feedback was that the mini-lesson was overwhelmingly ‘very useful’ (24 out of 26 writers) with only two children evaluating it as ‘quite useful’.
Taking the temperature of the room to see how useful each day’s instruction was forms an important part of my Writing for Pleasure classroom
What will happen in session four?
On Monday, we will have our speedy books out on our tables to act as our plan as we begin drafting into our class project books.
What will happen to the speedy books at the end of the class project?
They will be given to the EYFS classes to read and enjoy. Some will be given to younger siblings at home. I already have some in my bag for the weekend to take home and read to my daughter!
Classroom display showing the number of sessions available until the publication deadline
Today was session two in our class project and we were generating ideas using a technique called Thinking ‘faction’. This is where you use your knowledge of fictional worlds, settings, characters and events and use them as inspiration for a piece of information writing. This was the first time I have taught this mini-lesson. As usual, I had a go at it in advance, so I could talk it through with the children before inviting them to try it out for themselves. I surprised myself at the ease with which my ideas flowed.
My ideas span interests from my childhood, my teenage years, adulthood and some recent experiences shared with my daughter
To give some structure, I created a sheet divided up into sections: things from films, things from books, things from TV, things from games/YouTube etc. I set myself a finish line of twenty ideas and it took me about ten minutes to generate fourteen ideas. I explained to the children that this would be a great opportunity to do lots of talking (talk for writing is extremely important throughout the writing process) while we were doing it and that I would be joining in with them to cross my finish line during today’s writing time.
This child has assigned both a knowledge score and an interest score to his two favourite ideas to help him decide which one to write about
What struck me at the end of this session was just how many ideas we had generated as a class. Twenty-eight children, each with at least ten ideas on their pages, had generated many hundreds of ideas in less than twenty minutes. Who says children won’t have anything to write about? Not me.
Tomorrow in session three: Planning using ‘speedy’ books
A writing station should support children’s independence as writers by giving them the tools they might need to solve their own writing problems. Self-regulation (knowing what to do and how to do it) is an important affective need to attend to in every writing community and supporting its development requires careful consideration.
What is in our writing station?
A mini-lesson archive – This provides the opportunity for children to revisit any previous instruction. Currently, it is organised into eight craft areas: Being Writers, Generating Ideas, Organisation and Structure, Fluency, Clarity and Accuracy, Developing, Word Choices and Spellings.
2. A section related to goal setting – This contains: to-do lists, writing calendars, mini-lesson evaluation sheets and a selection of class project genre-booklets (these contain mentor texts and suggestions for how to navigate the writing process).
3. An area for publishing materials – At the moment, we have: line guides (narrow and wide), blank mini-books, blank speedy books, publishing menus, some stamped self-addressed envelopes (for sending out bits of writing so you can receive something in return) and publishing templates.
4. A place for revising and editing resources – Here we store: one-thousand word dictionaries, openings and endings examples and a variety of useful checklists.
5. Some pockets for idea generation – At present, we have: some ideas hearts, topic suggestion sheets, narrative arc examples and writing wheels.
How is it used?
Some children visit it all the time; others seldom do so. Why? Well, it probably depends on their particular need, and possibly their level of experience as a writer too. I often see children using it who are already successfully negotiating the writing process and know just what resource they are looking for. At other times, it functions as a supporting act to a pupil conference I might be conducting where I need to refer to something there. In this case, I always take the pupil with me to find the resource so they can remember where to find it again and become more familiar with the whole station. Frequently, children use it to teach each other which is a really pleasant aspect of being in a writing community.
Final thoughts
As a rule, I tend not to put a resource into the writing station until I have used it as part of a mini-lesson. I also conduct a mini-lesson at the start of the year about how we will use the writing station. Like the class library, this is an area of the classroom which children enjoy taking care of. They also specialise in organising it and appreciate having their suggestions about its contents valued. You will find that there are certain items which are mainstays of this area, while others might emerge during the year based on pupil need, or sometimes demand! Why not build your own and share it too?
Our class library holds a treasured place in our writing community. Creating one works well if you teach our Being Writers mini-lesson called Doing What Bookshops Do at the beginning of the first term and should be self-sustaining throughout the year. This helps develop children’s affective behaviours. For example: motivation, writer-identity, volition and agency.
It has several other important functions. Below are ten that come to mind:
Simply, it acts as a publishing goal (a place where writers can publish their writing for others to read) while supporting children’s understanding of some of the real reasons they may be moved to write.
It can help writers to understand large categories in writing (narrative: story and memoir, persuasion and opinion and non-fiction) as well as sub-divisions (genres like mystery stories, poetry or match reports).
As it belongs to the community, it can be shaped the way you wish, so it enables children to experiment with genre either by hybridising, or by creating micro-divisions which meet their writing interests (E.g. sword-fighting stories, poems about animals, or funny school tales).
It connects reading and writing by giving children an additional option when reading for pleasure. Many children choose to read each other’s, or their own writing during this time.
It increases the range and volume of potential mentor texts for future study during a class project.
Physically, it sits at the centre of the reading area demonstrating its importance, and its status is further raised because it makes available a plethora of options when reading aloud to the class.
Making it portable helps when you want to read for pleasure away from the classroom, or even if you want to loan your whole library to another class.
It is a great place into which to publish your own writing, or that of other writer-teachers.
It creates an additional area of the classroom which requires organisation and management helping to develop children’s sense of responsibility and authentic ownership over their learning environment.
It has the potential, in a mature and developed writing community, to act as an originator of fresh class project ideas, and may spawn its own mini-lessons as you navigate how best to use it.
Can anything be published into the class library? Ultimately, yes, but you will want to teach some other Being Writers mini-lessons relating to publishing expectations in order to strive for quality. These may look different depending on level of experience, however, the principles remain the same.
