DIY writing notebook for any writing walk
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All you need is two pieces of A4 paper to make each booklet - one for your printed cover and another for a blank sheet inside. (You could just use paper on a clipboard, but a booklet customises the experience.)
Decide what cover and prompts you want. You could use the example as it is - or adapt it to your own circumstance. More suggested 'prompts' appear below. (For this to work well, you need to have chosen 'landscape' and divided the page into 4 columns, and adjusted the margins.) After printing, assemble by following the 'small books' instructions: click the button on the right. |
Now you can start your language 'treasure hunt' - go for a writing walk around the school grounds, local museum - or further afield. Such exercises can be 'front-loaded' with language - searching for phrases in related texts can sharpen attention to vocabulary, voice, mode and register. Prompts can be as closed or open as you wish.
Writing walks are particularly valuable for broadening sensation to understandings beyond the classroom. The tactile and sensory reality gives meaning to words, and being outdoors stimulates new conversation, new ideas and fresh writing.
Here are some suggested writing prompts - but these could be collaboratively devised, according to the features and freedoms you want for your young young writers. e.g What shall we look out for/ attend to?
Simon Wrigley, June 2019
Writing walks are particularly valuable for broadening sensation to understandings beyond the classroom. The tactile and sensory reality gives meaning to words, and being outdoors stimulates new conversation, new ideas and fresh writing.
Here are some suggested writing prompts - but these could be collaboratively devised, according to the features and freedoms you want for your young young writers. e.g What shall we look out for/ attend to?
- Where would the bears have hidden?
- what would Hamlet have liked here - and why?
- which scene in your current reading might be filmed here - and why?
- describe something twice - from far, then close-up
- what are the scents, sounds, textures and movements that a photo of this place wouldn't catch?
- what are your feelings in this place? can you connect each one to a physical object?
- where is love? what other abstract nouns are manifested in this location?
- write down a memory provoked by something in this place
- write a sentence about this place starting with a prepositional phrase (inside, in the darkness under, just behind, across, amongst ...)
- find a location for your fronted adverbial
- find an example of each colour of the rainbow in what you can see.
- create a 'soundscape' in words
- make a list of 5 things you think no one else will have noticed
- write down exactly what you hear people saying
Simon Wrigley, June 2019