Important update from TheSchoolRun
For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.
What this means for subscribers:
- Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
- In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
- As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.
A few changes to be aware of:
- The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
- The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.
*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.
5 ways to turn your child into a budding writer
Inspiring your child to write
Although some children love writing stories, poems and letters, others would – let’s be honest – rather be playing on the computer or building Lego models. But with the right encouragement, even the most reluctant writer can enjoy the creative process of writing.
Download a FREE Creative Writing toolkit!
- KS1 & KS2 workbooks
- Bursting with fill-in prompt sheets and inspiring ideas
- Story structure tips, style guides and editing suggestions
To inspire a child to write, the task in hand needs to be meaningful. This means telling them what purpose their writing will have (are they writing a short story, a newspaper article or instructions for a computer game?) and who the audience is. Letting your child choose their own subject to write about, which taps into their life and interests, will also fire their enthusiasm. So how can you encourage them to pick up a pen and unleash their inner author?
1. Find an online audience
The internet provides children with lots of great opportunities to write with a purpose and for a real audience, which can turn them into engaged and enthusiastic writers. Setting up a blog where your child can write about family events such as holidays, celebrations and days out is a good way to get them into the habit of writing regularly. There are also lots of websites where children can write reviews of video games, books, films and TV programmes. Writing a blog is a brilliant activity to share as a family: children rarely see adults writing for pleasure, and it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate writing skills like how to construct and redraft a text.
2. Support a cause
If your child feels strongly about a particular cause such as animal welfare or child poverty, channel their passion into writing campaign materials. Charities such as the RSPCA, Born Free, WWF and ActionAid have lots of useful ideas for getting children involved in raising awareness of their campaigns and funds for their projects, such as by writing to their MP or designing their own posters.
3. Write a family history
What was the world like when Grandma was a schoolgirl? Talking to family members and collecting stories from their childhood is a great source of inspiration for your budding writer. Encourage your child to interview relatives about their experiences growing up, and then compile the stories into a family journal. This is a fantastic project to work on with your child, giving you the opportunity to model writing skills and styles while also preserving family memories for future generations.
4. Use games to get them writing
Computer games and creative writing may seem a world apart, but Minecraft, Mario Kart et al can be a great way into writing for tech-addict kids. As well as writing reviews or blogs for other users, your child could design their own game, or add another level to an existing game. This gives them invaluable practice in developing settings, characters, plot and effects, and also provides the chance to try out descriptive vocabulary, using words to bring their vision to life.
The activity can naturally be extended, for example by writing a blurb about the game, instructions and promotional leaflets.
5. Create a comic
It’s easy to be snobby about comics, but they’re a source of endless entertainment for children, and the recent surge in popularity of graphic novels has widened the genre still further.
If your child is discouraged by the thought of writing long tracts of text, producing a comic is an ideal way into creative writing. Comic Master is a free tool designed for children to create graphic novel style comics, selecting from a variety of layouts, backgrounds, characters, effects and fonts. You never know, your reluctant writer could become the next Jeff Kinney!
Alison Wilcox is author of Descriptosaurus: supporting creative writing for ages 8-14 (Routledge, £29.99). Alison has extensive teaching experience in schools in England and Scotland; colleagues describe her methods as 'innovative and inspirational to even the most reluctant of writers'.
