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consider how best to use it for writing without studying it all year. First, know the book well! It sounds obvious but I have often planned with someone who hasn’t read the story they’re teaching. By knowing the book, you know which chapters can be left out, and which lend themselves to great character work or writing. Next, make sure you fully immerse the children in the text. We read The Explorer when we were studying T ake a moment to consider a learning journey that resulted in an excellent standard of writing from your class. What made it so successful? Was it down to the audience and purpose you gave the children, the stimulus for writing, or something else entirely? There are many ways to focus your lessons, but for real success, we’ve found there are three essential considerations (see the panel, right, for details): 1. What pupils need to learn and the next step for their writing 2. The focus for the writing task 3. Stimulus, purpose and audience So, what does this look like in practice? Here’s what has worked for us... Exploring endings – Y4 When using a wonderful but lengthy book like The Explorer by Katherine Rundell, it can be overwhelming to rivers. We looked at the Amazon River in geography, so the children had some contextual information. We used drama and ‘role on the wall’ to develop our knowledge of the characters (role on the wall is when you draw the outline of a character; on the inside you put their feelings and around the outside you put how they act/present themselves). We added some of these ideas (and photos from our drama) to our working wall to remind ourselves of the characters when we were writing diary entries. We also explored the text further using authorfy.com The children loved hearing about the time Katherine Rundell ate a tarantula! Finally, make sure you have a specific focus. Too much choice can be a bad thing, and asking children to come up with an entire story, or even story ending, can be cognitive overload. Instead, we focused on an ending for a single chapter. We used a part in the story where the four children are on a raft and there is a fork in the river (serious suspense!). As a class, we brainstormed what problem the children might encounter here. They had fabulous ideas: someone falling overboard, a piranha infestation, or a waterfall. We modelled how this might work and how to build suspense with different sentence lengths (our main learning outcome for the writing task). Then the children wrote their Write this WAY Jump aboard Shackleton’s ship or sail the Amazon river, and use a laser focus to make children’s writing leap off the page, say Laura Dobson and Jess Blake www.teachwire.net | 69 “Make sure you have a specific focus. Too much choice can be a bad thing for writing” T E ACH RE AD I NG & WR I T I NG