Grab your pens, pencils and laptops and make your voices heard, as you join First Story in the annual celebration of the pleasure and power of creative writing. Whether you’re a young writer, a teacher, a parent, or anyone in between, National Writing Day is for you.
What is National Writing Day?
This year, with inspiration from Grace Nichols and James Berry, Joseph Coelho invites you to write a poem about a single moment in time and try out some simple drafting techniques to ‘polish’ your poem. Plus, check out Joseph’s tips for all budding poets -here!
Have a go at writing a poem about a single moment in time. Think of something you do or don’t like doing: It could be eating your favourite lunch, playing football, or singing along to the radio, or it could be the washing up, brushing your teeth, or taking the rubbish out. See how much you can explore of this little moment. Will you address the poem to someone you know, like Grace Nichols does? Will you reveal how you feel about this moment? Download the British Library's free National Writing Day Resource.
How can I take part?
LGfL Resources
The Whole Story
This resource features a professional storyteller offering his advice to teachers on how to incorporate storytelling across the curriculum using images, objects and structure. This resource aims to explore how storytelling can maximise the creativity within learning activities for your students by capturing the expert advice of a professional storyteller and arranging this advice into a simple interface.
ReadingZone Live
Students can also get advice on how to create their stories by well-known authors in ReadingZone Live. ReadingZone Live is a partnership between LGfL and Readingzone and brings regular interviews and live video calls with some of the best contemporary children’s authors to schools nationwide.
Antony Horowitz, Henry Winkler, Sophie McKenzie, Michael Morpurgo, Oliver Jeffers, Sally Nichols and Lauren Child are among the authors who have already joined us for ReadingZone Live, which is helping inspire young people to explore new authors and genres and to develop their own creative story creating.
Don't forget that our ReadingZoneLive Bookclub is back! Join the ReadingZone Bookclub programme of free virtual author events each term. The Bookclub is aimed at classrooms and libraries that are keen to develop a love of reading. Events for ages 5-11 years. Meeting an author can have a real impact on children's reading for pleasure - plus our Friday afternoon virtual Bookclub events are a great way to end the week! To sign up for any of these free events, and for more details, email info@readingzone.com
Busy Things
The wonderful Busy Things team have released a large number of well-known book extracts and activities based on the ReadingZone Live content (note USO sign in needed). Just Visit English > Reading: comprehension in your chosen setup and explore all the resources and don't forget they are a range of traditional tales resources available as well.
Space Adventures
You could explore Space Adventures Mission to the Moon. This unique and engaging cross-curricular resource is based around an original story commissioned by LGfL by the award-winning author Cath Howe. It features dramatic content and a Virtual Reality (VR) experience linked to the narrative. The aim is to draw the learner into the turn of events that threatens the ability of our intrepid astronaut, Tazz, to return safely back to Earth. Will Mic, the onboard computer, be enough to get her back safely? Or will she need to use her maths problem-solving skills and science knowledge and understanding to get her back to safety?
FairyTales
Early Years practitioners or Key Stage 1 could make use of our Fairy Tales resource and then re-tell their favourite fairytale using the PDF images included within the resource.
Listening Books
Another fantastic resource to use during this week is Listening Books (note USO sign in needed); these audiobooks are great to appreciate stories read aloud. There is a great range of fiction and non-fiction available to support pupils from Key Stage 2 up to A-Level, including:
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- My Friend Walter by Michael Morpurgo
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Face by Benjamin Zephaniah
Adobe Creative Express
Don’t forget as an LGfL subscribing school, you also have access to all the tools found in the Adobe Creative Cloud, why not use these tools to help your students tell their stories with this simple but powerful lesson example from Adobe Education Exchange? This short resource will walk you through a quick challenge to get started with Creative Cloud Express*. Learn ways creative Cloud Express for Education can be used to help your students make their thinking visible and share their voices with the world!
Creative Cloud Express for Education is a simple, powerful, presentation and storytelling tool which is perfect for the classroom. it’s quick and easy to master runs on any browser and includes a beautifully creative set of tools that will help unlock the creativity of your students.
* Creative Cloud Express for Education was previous called Adobe Spark for Education. This browser-based creativity tool brings together the Creative Cloud Express app, Photoshop Express, and Premiere Rush. You can still use your old Spark passwords and any projects you have saved will still be available. (Adobe has worked with Google to make sure that Creative Cloud Express is fully compatible with Chromebooks.)
For an even more powerful tool, why not use Adobe Audition the professional tool for precision audio editing, mixing, and sound effects. (Again part of your Let’s Get Digital Bundle) with this tool you capture, design, and mix sound with the industry's best digital audio workstation. With multitrack, waveform, and spectral frequency displays, easily record, edit, and clean up audio content, for more support with Adobe Audition go here.
BBC Sound Effects
When retelling and recording stories your students could make use of the BBC Sound Effects Archive – to enhance and enrich their oral stories, this large database of audio sound effects can be used within a wide range of applications in an educational context. Many sounds have multiple versions to suit different uses.
Other Resources
BBC Teach have a collection of teaching resources for secondary schools, perfect for inspiring your class with the wonder of stories during National Writing Day. First Story have collaborated with the team at BBC Teach and some fantastic contemporary writers to produce an exciting new set of creative writing resources, Inside the Writer’s Mind. Packed with tips and insights, six of the films in the BBC series are accompanied by a free classroom resource by First Story.
The National Literacy Trust have rounded up some of their favourite writing activities to help you celebrate and get writing. There are activities for primary pupils and secondary pupils.
Be sure to also check out World Book Day’s reading recommendation lists, where they have book lists for all readers of all ages with all types of interests. For younger readers, discover their Share a Story Corner video books.
The LGfL Inspire Team would love to hear some of your pupils’ stories – why not share them on our Twitter feed or our Facebook page #NationalWritingDay @FirstStory
This blog is edited from a previous blog posted for National StroyTelling Week.