Tag: Writing Prompts

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C19th January

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Super powers writing prompt plus planning for the Bournemouth Writing Festival children’s writing competition!

Monday

Monday CJS Club: Today this group had a choice of a superpowers writing prompt – they could respond with poetry, story or comic strip OR they could start making plans for a story or poem for Bournemouth Writing Festival’s children’s writing competition. The theme this year is ‘every dog deserves a home’ and the festival have teamed up with Waggy Tails dog rescue to launch the competition. A lot of the CJS children were excited to enter this and as well as some wonderful responses to the super power prompt, we had some rescue dog themed stories planned and even started! Here are a few pictures.

Tuesday

11 Plus Zoom Group: More ‘every day quick writes’ prompts for this group today. They could choose from the following:

  • What is one historical event you wish you could go back and witness?
  • What advice would you give to younger aspiring writers?
  • What’s one thing you are excited about today?
  • What would you say if you could ask your ancestors a question?
  • Write/draw about a character who discovers they have super-powers

Bransgore C of E Primary School: These guys also had a choice of the superpowers prompt OR planning/writing a story or poem for the Bournemouth Writing Festival children’s writing competition. We even had some wonderful poems finished and handed in within the session!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: The same array of prompts for these guys today plus lots of progress on some of their longer, on-going stories. Wonderful work from this talented bunch!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: This group seem to be really embracing the weekly prompts and we’ve had a lovely mix of creative non-fiction answers and poetry and stories! We also had another assignment handed in on our optional theme ‘broken’. Great work from all!

Wednesday CJS Club: The kids enjoyed experimenting with the feather pen and pot of ink I took in. The school clubs have all been very intrigued with this old-fashioned method of penmanship this week! They also got stuck into the prompts and/or decided to write stories/poems for the Bournemouth Writing Festival competition!

Thursday

Burton C of E Primary School: A choice between writing prompts about super-powers or entering the Bournemouth Writing Festival dog-themed competition! We also enjoyed experimenting with the ink and feather pen!

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 5th January

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Welcome back and happy new year!

Not all of out writing clubs were back yet this week but here’s what we kicked off with the ones who were…

Tuesday

11 Plus Zoom Group: We kicked off our new topic this week which is ‘everyday quick writing’. What is it, what does it involve and why is it important? After discussing what quick everyday writing is (essentially small bursts of routine writing in any style or format) we had four writing prompts to choose from. The prompts were creative non-fiction but they could choose to respond with fiction if they wanted and we had a lovely mix of both!

Wednesday

11 Plus Zoom Group: This group also started the everyday quick writing topic and again, we had a wonderful mix of responses to prompts which were creative non-fiction, or fiction. A wonderful start to a new term!

8-11 Zoom Group: really lovely work from the younger group today. They seemed really pleased with the topic and again, a lovely mix of creative non-fiction and fiction responses were written! fantastic!

CJS Wednesday club: Wonderful to be back with this group today and they are also doing the quick everyday writing topic. The only difference was they had to make their writing books first! They could choose their covers and there were pages of paper on offer including, lined, plain, coloured and squared. They had treasury tags to hold all the pages together and used cut up words and phrases to decorate their covers. They then started allocating pages for different things such as ideas, doodles, or characters… here are a few examples of their books so far!

Thursday

Burton C of E Primary School: Finished the week off with these guys and they were all very keen to make their new writing books. We will start writing in them next week! Here are a few of their books so far…

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 24th November

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Unreliable narrators on Zoom and creating our own adverts in school clubs!

Monday

Monday 11 Plus Zoom Group: This week via Zoom we are looking at unreliable narrators. What is an unreliable narrator, what different types of unreliable narrator exist in fiction and why they are sometimes used. We then set some writing prompts to explore the mindset of unreliable narrators! A great response from the first club of the week with members choosing from the list of prompts and exploring their own unreliable narrator. We also discussed how they have used unreliable narrators before without perhaps realising it!

CJS Monday Club: In school clubs this week we are trying to finish off the newspapers they have been working on since September. This week we are creating and designing our own adverts. It could be for something that already exists or something completely made up! We had a lovely selection of ads from them. Have a look at a few examples below!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 plus Zoom Group: more work on unreliable narrators for this group. Some great pieces were written, including the POV of a cat who witnesses a murder, and the POV of a very young child in danger. Great work!

Bransgore C of E Primary School Club: this group also enjoyed creating their own adverts for their newspapers today as you can see from the selection below!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom group: More work on unreliable narrators. What is an unreliable narrator and how can we spot one? The group did a great job responding to the prompts and we also realised how many of them have ongoing stories with unreliable narrators at the helm! There was one particularly clever and chilling piece written from the POV of a young child who does not realise she has witnessed a crime. Truly chilling!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: We added a Christmassy vibe to the unreliable narrator topic and the younger group could choose between arguing elves, a pet who hears all the Christmas secrets and arguments among siblings among other things. They did a great job responding to the topic!

Wednesday CJS Club: Here is another fun selection of adverts created this week!

Thursday

Burton C of E Primary School: Only the second session with these guys and they have been doing a fantastic job creating mini newspapers/magazine. We’ve got ongoing comic book strips, mini news articles, adverts, puzzle pages, stories, poems and even songs among their work so far! Absolutely brilliant! I’ll post some examples next week.

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 10th Nov

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Personification continued with added POV!

Monday

Monday Zoom Group: We continued exploring the personification of landscape this week in the writing clubs, in particular with the following prompt: Landscape as character continued:

This time get into the POV of the landscape. You can use the same landscape from last session or choose a new one. This time you ARE the landscape, you can do this in 1st POV or 3rd, but try to show what the landscape sees, hears, feels and wants…

The Monday group responded very well to this with detailed and complex pieces that really brought landscapes to life with personification and POV!

Monday CJS Club: Playing a bit of catch up this week as they didn’t have a session last week due to a staff day. They also explored personification, which was new to some of the younger ones! They did really well!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: Today we were playing around with both personification and POV within landscapes and had some great examples, including some using 3rd POV which is a bit harder to do! Well done everyone!

Bransgore C of E Primary School Club: These guys have been really rising to the challenges lately which was been amazing to see! Today they extended their knowledge of personification and applied it to landscapes with either 1st or 3rd person POV. Again, for some of the younger ones this is very new stuff, but they did so well!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: Great results from this bunch with the personification and POV within landscape prompts, As always such a pleasure to hear these guys read their work out loud with such pride!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: The younger group also had a go at the same prompt and did so well! Pretending to be an object is an easy way into exploring POV so we started with that for some of them. The results were amazing!

Wednesday CJS Club: More playing around with personification and POV in landscape, but also finding an easier way in with becoming an object or an animal instead. The group enjoyed trying to make the rest of the class guess what landscape or object they were!

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 20th October

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Creepy writing prompts and word-throwing!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: Lots of spooky writing prompts on offer today including ‘word-throwing’ from a story starter and lots of’ What If…’ scenarios. They also made progress with their Lakeside View stories!

Monday CJS Club: We did an activity as a group, ‘word-throwing’ with a story starter. The story starter was ‘I stepped into the darkness and…’ which was then followed by me calling out a random word every minute. The children can use the word, change the word slightly or ignore the word. We had such fantastic results from this session and every singe piece written fits perfectly into the Lakeside View project!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom group: This group mostly went for the ‘What If…’ scenarios which included ‘What if the darkness came and never left?’ and ‘What if you put on a mask for halloween and it would not come off?’ The results were suitably creepy from all!

Bransgore C of E Primary School Club: This group had the story starter and word-throwing activity and it went so well! Every single child wrote something suitable for the Lakeside View project and every single child was so proud of their work they wanted to stand and read it out! I was amazed by the amount written too!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: A perfectly creepy mix of responses to the Halloween themed prompts from these guys plus one Lakeside View story finished and another one very close to the end!

Wednesday 8-11 Group Zoom Group: These guys responded to the prompts beautifully and some also helped each other construct spooky spells and potions with some lively suggestions in the chat!

Wednesday CJS Club: Another wonderful word-throwing session! This group were also incredibly proud of their spooky writing and all of them are going in the Lakeside View book1

Have a great half-term everyone!

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 15th September

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Article writing for everyone!

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: We carried on with the articles we started last week! Great work everyone.

Monday CJS Club: Fantastic to be back with this club today, with a mix of familiar faces and new ones. We got started on article writing! They could write real articles or made up ones, and could use picture prompts and headline suggestions to help them. They made a terrific start as you can see from the images, and we will finish these off next week!

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: Lots of finished articles in this group today, well done everyone! We then moved onto a poetry prompt. ‘I Am…’ poetry templates were posted in the chat for students to respond to. The template involved three stanzas, each starting with a line such as ‘I am…’ or ‘I hope…’ The first ‘I am’ line is repeated at the start and end of each stanza. These can be filled in from a personal perspective or from the pov of a character! We had a mix of responses and all were absolutely wonderful!

Bransgore C of E Primary School: Today the children finished the articles they started last week and as you can see from the pictures, they are very eye catching! From lost dogs, and shoplifters, to portals to cake land and warring islands, these news stories are extremely imaginative! Well done everyone!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Group: A mix of finishing articles and trying the ‘I Am…’ poetry template from this group today. Lots of work shared and a bit more progress on the Lakeside View projects too! Fantastic!

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Group: These guys finished their articles last week so today tried the ‘I Am’ poetry template, using their Lakeside View characters for the POV! These were excellent and are definitely going in the book!

Wednesday CJS Club: Lovely to be back with this bunch today! They started their mini articles and had fun deciding what their front page news would be! The images below show how hard they worked on these today!

Children’s Writing Clubs W/C 2nd June

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What have we been up to this week?

Monday

Monday Zoom Club: It was a warm welcome back after the half-term break and straight back into our collaborative writing project! We started with a writing prompt that they could use to write a scene for their town story or just respond to with an unconnected piece. The prompt for this week for all the clubs was:

“I don’t know what is worse… The sound, the smell, or what I have imagined in my head.”

We had some wonderful responses, some connected to town stories and some not. Well done everyone!

(Note: There was no CJS Monday club this week due to a staff day.)

Tuesday

Tuesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: This group also responded wonderfully to the prompt and we had a mix of pieces unrelated to their project stories and some that were connected. We also had a wonderful poem!

Tuesday Bransgore Primary School Club: These guys started with ten minutes of silent writing to respond to the prompt and then got on with their project stories. It was lovely to see lots of progress on some of these stories too!

Wednesday

Wednesday 11 Plus Zoom Club: Wonderful work as always from this group who got stuck straight into the prompt and produced some incredibly tense pieces! Some were connected to their projects stories and some not.

Wednesday 8-11 Zoom Club: Despite being the youngest group, these guys also tackled the same writing prompt with amazing results and made progress on their project stories!

Wednesday CJS Club: Ten minutes of silent writing time responding to the prompt went down very well with this committed group of young writers! Major progress made on project stories!