Let's Write: Activities to develop writing skills for 7—11 year olds

Let’s Write offers a wealth of suggestions for approaches to developing primary school pupils’ writing skills that will capture the children’s interest, while enabling them to improve their ability to express themselves in writing. It aims to meet the requirements of the new national curriculum for English at KS2 in a way that will develop the children’s standard of writing by presenting activities that they will find enjoyable and stimulating.

Throughout the book, the emphasis is on providing activities that will engage the pupils in a discussion of how texts are structured, before producing their own writing. John Foster suggests a range of imaginative tasks that both literacy specialists and non-specialists will find useful in developing children’ ability to write coherently and correctly.

Let’s Write includes:

• a clear explanation of the writing process with activities designed to improve pupils’ drafting skills
• examples of the different types of writing for pupils to analyse, which they can use as models for their own writing
• a range of imaginative ideas for writing tasks, together with suggestions of curriculum opportunities for practising particular forms
• writing challenges which can be used to stretch more able writers and thus to introduce differentiation by task, as well as by outcome
• writing tips, for example, on sentence structure and paragraph structure, appropriate to the different types of writing
• activities involving pupils in the assessment of their writing
• a section on writing correctly, focussing on grammar, spelling and punctuation
• a section containing games and activities designed to extend pupils’ vocabulary.

Let’s Write provides teachers with a lively collection of resources that will be welcomed by teachers and that will help to develop children’s writing.

John Foster taught English for twenty years before becoming a full-time writer. He has written over 100 books for classroom use and is a highly regarded children’s poet, anthologist and poetry performer.