What’s the most effective way of developing skills for writing?

It is interesting to note that one of the most effective ways of getting children to be creative and original in their story writing is simply to ask the children to be creative and original.

I was really quite surprised when I watched the experiment being done – but I was also disappointed in the results.

The problem is that although when asking children to be more creative one generally gets stories that are unusual, one doesn’t often get stories that also take a step forwards in terms of creative writing. As this simple experiment confirms, originality alone is not the key to bringing writing to life and improving the quality of the story.

In fact, as many teachers have pointed out to me, there are a number of skills that children need to master in order to bring their writing to life – which is why I have long been keen to produce a set of books that explore these skills and offer activities and exercises that children can use to improve their creative writing.

The result is a series of three books: ‘Developing Skills for Writing’ covering levels 2, 3 and 4.

The books contain sentence and text level activities which explore exactly how ‘powerful verbs’ can be used effectively, how ‘connectives’ can be used to signal time, how to compose ‘complex sentences’, how to use adjectives to create detail etc. In fact there’s a whole range of skills to move children’s writing on from National Curriculum Level 2 to Level 4.

Developing Skills for Writing uses, throughout the series, a multisensory approach to teaching, including word games, role play and oral activities covering all frequently used punctuation and grammar skills. Clear lesson plans explain every activity. A ‘Helping Hand’ is used to remember key facts and where possible, optional worksheets focus on boys’ interests.

If you’d like to see exactly how we have tackled this issue there are free sample pages available from www.topical-resources.co.uk/literacy