2026 - A Year of Reading

READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read. Kate DiCamillo

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When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. Zadie Smith

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Happy New Year! 2026, a National Year of Reading, is here and is to be celebrated. Reading is what makes us writers. Reading is our playground, our solace, our inspiration. All writers are indebted to the writers who have gone before us. As we read, we are transported, amazed, intrigued, challenged. As we read we absorb the language and rhythms of many voices. As we read, we discover that things that we never imagined could be written about, can be written about, in ways that comfort and strengthen us and in ways that we had not thought could be. Sometimes our reading opens a door that helps us to write something that we thought we could not write. Sometimes when we read, we discover we are not alone and sometimes we are made privy to lives and ways of thinking that we may not have otherwise known.

One of our tasks as teachers of writing is to find the writers whose work can inspire and inform young writers who are developing their own fluency and style. ‘Read, read, read, read, read’, says Kate DiCamillo. Indeed. Use your libraries. As I think about 2025 and forward to 2026, I am grateful to my local Suffolk library which has provided me with books written by people from across the world and from many walks of life and persuasion. The pleasure of finding writers whose voice, style and wisdom surprise and delight me is immense. When I am able then to share that writing with others, adults and children, the pleasure is doubled. It is a kind of magic to see how one writer can inform the writing of another; how the invention of a writer proves to be a particular inspiration for others.

It is my intention, this year, to restore and to add to, the recommended reading lists that formed part of the original website. It may take a while, because I would like the lists to be practical and helpful. There are books about teaching writing, books by writers about writing, books about language and the nature of composition and there are the books that speak to young people and offer them the means to let their pens fly. I shall begin, this month, with books about words; a quiet start, and one that reflects the way I run a workshop, beginning, always, with listing words in one way or another.

I wish you a year of good reading. Let the writing begin!

1. Read lots.

2. Write lots

3. Don't give up. Ian Rankin

https://www.nationalyearofreading.org.uk

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/creative-matters/blog/long-reads/investing-power-reading

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/about-us/news-updates/supporting-the-national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://literacytrust.org.uk/about-us/national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://thequeensreadingroom.co.uk

https://readingagency.org.uk/get-reading/our-programmes-and-campaigns/national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/07/07/national-year-of-reading/

Kindness

Let us begin with kindness. The world we live in just now is filled with anger and fear. It’s a volatile mix. Fear, especially, seems to make us clamp down, to generate rules and restrictions, to threaten dire consequences. It is not good for our children. It is not good for us. In a recent Instagram post, NO THEM, ONLY US, Oliver Jeffers reminds us of our duty of care ‘to our children and grandchildren to break these sickening cycles of violence and vengeance in both thought and action that distract and divide us.’

‘The answer to this,’ he believes, ‘lies in human decency. In kindness, tolerance, humility and ingenuity. Re-evaluating what it is we actually have with this life on earth, and what we actually want from it.’

‘As ever, we have work to do.’

What we do in school cannot help but be touched by the world around us. Although the world of school is very different from the acts of physical violence and hatred that surround us, I think that current expectations of teachers and the curriculum are in themselves a kind of violence. Teachers do their best to provide a rich and fertile environment where children may grow. It is not always easy. We could do with fewer barriers and constraints. We have a duty to our children to nurture them in ways that help them find a path through the scariness with courage and imagination, and to have at their fingertips a whole raft of knowledge and skills which them help them grow and understand, and upon which they will draw in good times and bad. Writing is one of those things. Writing is intimately wrapped up with story and poetry and thinking and remembering, appreciating and wondering and imagining. Writing sits alongside drawing and painting and making, dancing and acting, singing and making music.

Writing thrives on and fosters community. It can open up our thinking, cultivate awareness, help us grow. It can be a way of solving problems and of affirming who we are and imagining who we might become. I have worried a great deal about the new Writing Framework. As I write this and look back at ‘why writing matters’, I think that maybe the Framework writers would agree with me. But I am not sure. And as I reread more of the framework, it feels so locked down, so distant from a real experience of what writing can be, I wonder whether its authors fear writing; loathe it, even. If that is the case it is great pity. Far too many of us hold a fear of writing. Far too many teachers fear writing. They may have been told at some time in their schooling that they are bad writers; or they have struggled to write about things they were not interested in in ways that didn’t make sense to them. Very often writing failure is experienced as a failure of self, also. We keep pushing writing away from us and we need to take hold of it and find what it can do for us and what we can do if we write.

One of the ways to do that, especially if you are a teacher, is to write with others. Find a group. See if there is a teachers’ writing group near you. If that is not possible or attractive to you, then write for yourself, quietly, each day. Look on this website. You will find many ideas of how to start. As you write, relax into it. Write for yourself. As you write, begin to notice what you are learning. Be prepared to share that with those you teach. Show them real writing. Know that you learn to write not by writing sentences, but simply by writing. Write for yourself; write for someone else.

Write with love.

Stepping into the sunlight

This July, just as schools were preparing for the end of the summer term and we were thinking about the following few weeks when holidays could be taken, and life lived a little more freely, the DfE published The Writing Framework. It’s designed to go alongside The Reading Framework and, to emphasise that, has come up with A Simple View of Writing to mirror the simple view of reading. Why is it, I wonder, that we must deny complexity? (I know, I know, they say that it doesn’t imply that writing is simple but … )

I should have written about The Framework straight away. I intended to. But the thing made me so deeply angry that I decided not to write in the furnace of my rage but to give it some time to settle. I had not meant that settling time to be quite so long. Or that it should have allowed the sadness to creep in alongside the anger. I remain positive. The framework must be addressed, but I shall not write directly about it today, except to observe that it is not statutory. So let’s hold our horses.

In the meantime, let’s look at the bibliography. Will it give us some insight as to what has given rise to this document? Glancing down the first page, I spot Frank Cottrell-Boyce – ‘David Fickling lecture: Literacy, reading and children.’ It comes as no surprise that the quoted link is no longer available, but a quick search brings up an extract.

As I read it, I was suddenly reminded of a literacy conference focusing on creativity. It was held in London on the day after the attack on the Twin Towers and so the atmosphere was charged. David Almond was there and he spoke wonderfully about his visits to schools and how he shows children his notebooks. He showed one to us. It was messy. There were jottings and scribbles. He showed us how he sometimes writes with the page upside down. He mentioned the discomfort some teachers feel about this. And as the session continued, and more people joined the stage (perhaps it was time for questions?), two or three of them, slowly, but very deliberately, stood in front of David, with his messy notebook and his ideas of freedom and openness. There was something unsettling about this denial on that particular day. Despite lip service to something more humane, the drive for stultifying rules and mind-numbing drills remains. The reference to Frank Cottrell Boyce’s lecture is in the Framework’s bibliography but it is at all too easy to imagine its perpetrators, with steely determination, standing in front of it, so we can’t see.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s lecture tingles with joy, with passion, with humour. He reminds us how valuable stories are and how crucial it is to read aloud and how story is a way of opening ourselves up to others as readers and as writers. He reminds us how reading, and writing, are filled with unknown promise; he gently reminds us how, as teachers, we can find ourselves shutting all that down.

Let’s not allow ourselves to stand in front of the messy notebook.

Let’s be fearless.

Let’s step into the sunlight.

Reading aloud

Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud.
- Mem Fox, Australian children’s author

When we think about feeding the writer, we think about reading. Perhaps, we think about them devouring one book after another as we might have done as bookish children. However, we should never forget the power and the pleasure of being read to. Rumours go around that reading aloud is not teaching, but we know that reading aloud is essential nourishment. Even as adults we love the sound of another reading a story, maybe we use audible, maybe we are lucky enough to know someone who loves to read to us. Then the stories come to us, the rhythms and magic of the writing capture our minds, our imaginations.

For many children, this is how they come to know how particular writers sound. By reading aloud we open up the text for them. They may well want to read the book themselves once they have heard it. As a teenager, television dramatisations opened the door to Dickens for me. I would watch an episode or two and then start reading at pace so that I was always ahead of the televised story. The televised adaptation helped me gain purchase on the unfamiliar language and context. We know that sometimes when we start reading an unfamiliar author the going can be slow until we get used to their way of putting words together.

So, when we read aloud, we ease the way in for less experienced readers. For many children, particularly in primary school, when reading might still be a slow business, we can read novels that are intellectually and emotionally relevant to them and that might still be too laborious for them to read for themselves with any pleasure. We voice the text. A Year 5 child for whom English was an additional language liked to hear her teacher reading, because when she read the book herself she heard her teacher’s voice in her head. She heard the writer’s voice through her teacher’s voice. It was particularly pertinent for her, but I think there are many of us, adults and children, who are introduced to the voice of a writer through the intermediary voice of a good reader.

Once we have heard those rhythms aloud we can draw upon them when we are reading and when we are writing. They become part of our own voice and we can try them out using our own words. Reading aloud, one to one, is an essential part of learning to read. Reading aloud provides a shared experience: meditative, hilarious, challenging, surprising, communal. It draws us together. It becomes part of our cultural capital. Reading aloud is not just for the youngest children. We are all drawn in by the spoken word. My English teacher sometimes read us short stories during A level lessons. ‘The Rain Horse’ by Ted Hughes, Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp’. I have not forgotten them, nor the quiet of the room as he read, nor the ways in which a story might work. Even if we don’t have time to read whole texts to older students, we can still read poems, shorter extracts from prose. Sometimes the music of a writer is harder to hear when one reads silently. I didn’t properly notice the loveliness of Gilbert White’s nature diaries until I read them aloud. It is why it is so helpful to read our own writing aloud, and to hear others read theirs.

In the opening chapter to her wonderful book about writing stories, Steering the Craft, Ursula Leguin says:

The sound of the language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships. This is just as true of written prose as it is of poetry, though the sound-effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.
…. I think awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer.

Our voices, what our writing sounds like, come from all that we have read and heard and how people do or do not listen to us. If we are to feed the young writer, then reading aloud is an essential part of the diet. We will offer it and they will use it in the ways that are theirs.

A book a day

Two years ago, at about the time my mother died, the Penguin newsletter carried an article called  How to read a book a day for a month and survive.

In that time immediately after a death and in the house where my mother lived, I found that reading a book a day, an untidy list of titles that I mostly found by chance, worked for me. By the time the month had finished, I was almost drunk on the quick succession of unexpected prose. Each day I encountered a different style and point of view. Many short novels are in translation so I was immersed in different cultures and ways of seeing. The short novel seems to allow for experimentation. The brevity of each book sharpened the focus. I decided to do it again the following year.

I became adept at scanning the shelves of libraries and bookshops, new and second-hand, for thin spines. I searched, and found, lists of short novels recommended by other readers. Brevity allows one to be more adventurous – you are only going to be with the writer for a day. I constantly surprised myself. I found myself describing the experience as something like cold water swimming or daily cross country running. There is something muscular and exhilarating about it. I found, also, that I was, more consciously, reading as a writer.

The intensity and focus of this daily reading habit encourages me to notice the workings of novels. The immediate contrasts between one book and the next draws attention to style and technique. The length of the novel intensifies the way the writer tells the story, encourages gaps which make the reader work in satisfying ways, makes words count more intensely so that the experience can be like reading a long poem. I have included non-fiction and poetry in my lists though I have found that I prefer not to read poetry collections in a day. I like to read poetry slowly, to leave space between one poem and another.

I recommend the challenge to you. It makes me feel alive with language and storytelling, with the fizz and unexpectedness of other people’s thinking. It makes me want to write.

Reading Closely

One of the most pleasurable ways of spending time with children is time spent sharing books. It may be Orange Pear Apple Bear over and over again, Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie series, joyously sharing the dialogue, or the complexities of The Imaginary, Clockwork, Skellig or Gleitzman’s, Once that sends Year 6 children scurrying to read all the rest of that series of novels. When we read together we deepen the experience of reading and we feed the writer.

There is, in Norfolk, a school where, once a week, the whole school is reading together. There was. I imagine it still happens. It was started by its remarkable English lead, first in her own Upper Key Stage 2 class, then for all Key Stage 2 and later, through the whole school. For one morning a week, children, in small groups, guided by an adult, read novels and picture books. The school is lucky enough to be able to recruit enough additional volunteers to make sure the groups are small and that children have time to savour what they are reading. That slow tasting and appreciating each text is important. The quietness that falls on the school as children enter the world of books is, in itself, something to be savoured.

Ten years ago, in the school where I am a governor, we introduced a similar thing. Not the whole school reading at once, but the reading of a series of novels in small groups. If they read nothing else, by the time they leave primary school, these children will have experienced close encounters with up to fifty novels. We call it guided reading, but, now, having experienced it myself for all these years, I would prefer to call it close reading. The guidance is there but the guidance is two way. The adult brings their experience of reading and of texts and the children bring their own ways of looking, their own preoccupations and questions. Each time I read a novel with a group, I discover it anew. Each group and each child within it takes something different from the reading. And what I noticed, very early in my experience of this kind of group, was that not only did children love the reading, they linked it to their understandings of writing.

We know that reading nourishes the writer.  ‘When still a child,’ says Zadie Smith,  ‘make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.’ When reading in small groups we can make it possible for young readers to make the reading their own and, at the same time, let  them experience, discover, something about how writers, how writing can work.

Keeping ourselves safe

If we are to keep our young writers safe, then we must feel safe ourselves. This is no easy matter for teachers at the moment. To be frank, we do not feel safe. We have been made to feel wrong; to feel that we are not up to scratch. We lose confidence in our own knowledge and the deep understandings that come from working with young learners day after day. Because the rules are such, because the way teachers are judged to be qualified or worthy of promotion are such, that we must doubt our own experience. We fear inspection; we fear senior management teams, who are also afraid and probably know too little about writing themselves; we fear observations and tick lists; we fear that we will lose our jobs; we fear that we will be found wanting against criteria that have little to do with the lives of children and how they might flourish.

We are told that we must be teaching exactly the same things, in the same way, at the same time as our colleague who teaches the parallel class. We are told that, even though you are two very different people, teaching two wildly different groups of children, despite the weather, despite the time of day, despite the world news and the particular events of the lives of the children. And so we may teach without conviction. Or we may teach with conviction in ways that, if we were to give it a second thought, we would see as utterly lacking in sense. We may teach from pre-digested schemes, dreamed up by people who have no idea about who or how our children are. We press writing on children, top down, outside not in. We are not encouraged to think outside the box, and, you will know, just how small that box has become; just small enough to take a tick that confirms that we have read what we have been told to read, that we have regurgitated the axioms conveyed to us at the latest on-line training; that we have not thought for ourselves.

When we think for ourselves we are simultaneously unafraid and full of anxiety. We find ourselves doing it anyway. And then we find that what we do is welcomed. That those who hear of what we are doing or who see it, are amazed. When I meet with other writing teachers I hear stories from teachers who have made independent decisions about how they teach writing. There are often dramatic stories of the inspection, the monitoring visit or a baffled response to children’s success. These often include an account of the approaching footsteps -stiletto heels echoing down the corridor, the senior leader purposefully crossing the playground, the beating heart of the guilty party. And then the reveal: the inspector loved the way you teach writing/ thought that was the best writing lesson they had seen. What is it you do? The teacher who has taken over your class from last year wants to know why those children love writing so much -asked without irony but with genuine puzzlement.

These teachers run writing workshops, write alongside their students, regularly have time for freewriting and share their own writing with their classes. They teach children to be interested in and delighted with words; they respond with genuine interest and pleasure and give feedback that helps writers to see what they have achieved; they teach those writers ways in which to give feedback in the same way. There are many other things they do. Their ideas are evident throughout this website. They read widely and they read with the intention of learning more about writing and how to teach it. They work out their principles and can explain them. They regularly attend teachers’ writing groups.

I cannot claim that we feel safe, but we have confidence in how we work. Doubting ourselves is part of the deal but we also can touch on our core values. When we meet and write together, we experience ourselves as part of a community of writing teachers. We write and hear each other’s writing. We listen to shared worries and to stories from our classrooms. We experience writing in ways which strengthen how we teach and respond to children. We are reminded that we are not alone.

Keep her safe...

As I was writing my last post about feeding the inner writer, and planning further posts about the many ways in which we can do so, I wondered if I should have begun with the second piece of advice Anne Enright gives the writing teacher: ‘keep her safe.’ Here is the paragraph from her essay, ‘This is the gig’.

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances is to feed the student and to keep her safe. Angela Carter did the first, with a scattering of photocopies, musings and anecdotes (she never mentioned my work, I think), and Malcom Bradbury did the second, by smiling a lot, and liking books, and keeping quiet (I don’t think he mentioned my work either –I might be wrong). The other students did mention my work; they had various opinions about it, but that was fine, because Malcom was there to like us all, and keep us safe.

[In Foden, G. editor (2011) Body of Work. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Full Circle Editions.]

If we are to write well, if we are to write at all, we need to feel safe. If we are to write what is important to us, we need to feel safe. If we are to take those all-important risks, we must feel safe. Malcom Bradbury smiled a lot and liked them all. That is the first thing we need to be able to do: to like our students. It is not always easy. We can begin by discovering what is interesting, what is good, what is particular to each person. Writing can be a wonderful way of making those discoveries about a person.

We must stop imposing our ideas of what ‘proper’ writing should be like and be open to what young writers bring to us. If they are worried about producing ‘the right thing’, they are less likely to feel safe, and less likely to write well. We have to stop ourselves fretting about correctness; stop allowing that to be the first thing we think about when we propose a task or when we hear or read what has been written. Let us be surprised and delighted. Let us take young writers seriously as Michael Armstrong does, recognising them as having the same desires and impulses as an adult artist may have. They simply have less experience to draw upon.

We do have a responsibility to introduce children to what we know about writing, to help them understand conventions and even some rules, to introduce them to as much of the cultures of the world as we are able. We do not have to impose any of this upon them as the only way. Alison Gopnik (2009) suggests that the prolonged period of immaturity that is unique to humans is bound up with the human capacity for change. She says:

An animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge. An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time.

[Alison Gopnik (2009) The Philosophical Baby. Bodley Head: London.]

When we are children we are devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that world could be. When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned to use.

The writing classroom can be a wonderful place for discovering who we are and what we have come from. It is a place where we can think on paper and where we can use our imaginations. It is a place where we constantly learn from each other, no matter our age, our personal experiences. For me, one of the most exciting things about a writing workshop is that one can never really predict what is going to happen. One of my great pleasures is to see a writer reading their work aloud and discovering from those around them that their writing has worked in ways they hadn’t fully believed were possible.

That excitement does not come if we have already pinned down our writers so tightly that surprise is not only unlikely but is probably unwelcome. We must trust our writers and they must trust us. They must know that we are interested in what they have to write and that we are interested in the ways in which they write.

Now that I have written this much, I realise that before we think about keeping children safe so they may write well, we need to feel safe ourselves. In my next post, that is what I will think about. In the meantime, consider the ways in which you keep the writers you work with safe. We should love to hear from you.

Feed the Writer

Writing is learned from the inside out. So say Janet Emig, academic, and Ann Enright, novelist. Many others say the same in different ways. In Body of Work, a collection of essays by UEA Creative Writing alumni, edited by Giles Foden, Ann Enright goes on to say:

…It is not a subject like geography that can be doled out in parcels of information. Writing is a discipline and, as with any discipline whether spiritual or physical, the doing is everything. No one can do it for you.

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances is to feed the student and to keep her safe.

What does this look like for the primary school child or secondary school student? What can their teachers do? What can they do to feed their students?

So many things.

In feeding the inner writer we can think about the experiences they already have and others that we can make available to them. Some experiences may involve body and mind, a change of scenery or perspective. Some experiences may be about immersing themselves in ways of writing: experiencing how it is to write with these rhythms or those restrictions. These may allow the young writer to discover ways in which their own experiences can emerge through writing.

And each experience brings with it its own language, the words and syntax and music that allows us to name and explore, to discover, challenge and imagine.

Recently, I have been helping children in Key Stage 2 to prepare performances for Poetry by Heart. Children are required to learn one poem, or two from a set list, one published before 1918 and one after. It is a wildly affirming thing. In the schools where I volunteer, we take great care to match the poems to the child. They often surprise us with which ones they like. We read them a small selection that we think might work for them and from which they choose. It is a magic thing to see them respond and we know when the choice is right. There may be a huge grin, a declaration of allegiance or, more often, a softening, a sense that this poem is the one. There is something within it that speaks to them. I want to mention it because that commitment to the poem is crucial. They will work with the poems for weeks. The poems will stay with them a lifetime.

In Poetry by Heart children do take poems to the heart of themselves. They allow the poems to speak through them. They allow themselves to speak through the poems. It is a two way traffic. And it has an impact on their writing. Like so many things, we come at it slant.

Here is a way in which we feed our writers. It is a particularly literary offering. There are many others. Over the next few weeks, I shall be thinking about the ways in which we can feed our young writers and how we keep them safe.

Making a Difference

I was delighted that NWP were once again invited to run a writing workshop at the UKLA International Conference, 60 Years of UKLA Making a Difference, on Friday 5th July. I had hoped to be at the workshop with the wonderful Theresa Gooda, but she was, alas, not able to be there in the morning. You may have encountered her at other sessions and workshops throughout the conference; we would both love to hear from you if you were there. 

In preparing for this workshop  I thought about what we, within NWP,  have learned from children and each other as we write and reflect together in many different contexts. We are coming to better understand, through long-term, informal ethnographic study, the nature of writing and the teaching of writing as practice.

When adults and children are given the freedom to take ownership of their writing, one sees, again and again, the essential human nature of writing and its links to drawing, making, thinking and language; its relationship with the mind, spirit and body. To feel confident about writing and to be aware of oneself as a person who writes is a powerful thing. If students are to learn to write, we must honour their language and give them space and freedom to be playful, subversive, inventive, experimental. None of us, adult or child need have writing imposed on us. We learn writing, as Anne Enright says, from the inside out. When teachers write together we learn about ourselves as writers and, collectively, think about those we teach and the ways in which we set up the conditions that allow that inside out learning in our writing classrooms.

Now, more than ever, teachers and children need to take back the pleasure and the power of language that is a part of who we are. 

I wandered...

The Lake District. 50 mph winds; clouds scud in packs; sunlight chases across the fellsides and disappears over the ridges; daffodils more jitterbug than gavotte. The speed of the wind brings downpours and quickly takes them off down the valley. White horses crest the lake.

I discover that whilst William Wordsworth had his daffodils dancing in the breeze, Dorothy, on the same occasion, records a storm: the ‘furious wind’ seizing her and William’s breath. Maybe today we walked in weather closer to those dancing daffodils than I thought.

As we walked, I listened to the fearsome roar of the woods. I thought about the difficulty of capturing the many small moments of the hillside path; the lichen: silvered, ochre, the palest green; the fells like nineteenth century etchings, grey and lowering; cushions of moss and the downward rush of water between rocks and squelch; the patterns forming and reforming across the lake as the wind blew this way and that and a scatter of martins, small, quick arcs riding the air above the water.

And, as I walked, I also thought about writing: how difficult it can be sometimes and what an essential part it can play in our lives. I thought about the barriers that schooling can place between the child and their writing selves; and about the ways in which we can open up to them writing in its many forms. We can restrict ourselves, and those we teach, by limiting our picture of what writing can be, what it can do. And yet, if we open ourselves up to thinking about words and drawings on paper, the possibilities seem endless.

I am always struck by how much children welcome the opportunity to freewrite, and how often I stop the flow of their writing too soon. Freewriting allows a personal exploration of what pen and paper and mind can do. It is a place of experimentation and discovery both in terms of thought and of style. It is the kind of writing that helps me find direction, even as it seems to wander. Over the years, it has loosened up the way I use notebooks and has helped me to develop ideas and to find ways of expressing those ideas.

I have begun reading The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Its contents span an unexpected variety of uses for writing. It reminds me of a wonderful exhibition at Kettle’s Yard Lines of Enquiry: Thinking Through Drawing which was an exhibition of the way thinkers in many fields use drawing as part of their work. The exhibition included drawings by archaeologists, astronomers, composers, geneticists, geologists, historians, physicists, surgeons, zoologists amongst many others.

Drawing and writing help us to think.

In describing Darwin’s use of notebooks, Allen explains how, on the voyage of the Beagle, his notebooks contained ‘whatever caught Darwin’s eye’, formal geological observations sitting alongside notes of expenditure, people met, routes taken. The historian, John van Whyle, describes them as ‘the worst’. ‘Not written at a desk, often in pencil, short lines, staccato notes, terrible handwriting, very faint, with arcane geological content.’ Over time, Darwin developed his use of notebooks. Once aboard ship, he wrote up his notes from trips ashore as coherent narrative. Later, he dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions, including those where he conducted a dialogue with himself, asking questions and pursuing his thoughts. On the page of his notebook where he drew his first evolutionary tree, Darwin wrote, ‘I think.’

Too often we think of writing as an end product, rather than as a part of a process of thought. I am wondering now about the ways in which we can encourage more fluid, speculative and adventurous kinds of writing in our classrooms.

What might that look like?

What's in a name?

We are entering the last of January, so I am getting in my new year’s wishes before the end of the month. Happy New Year! I have so much to write about and have just not been able to shape anything coherent; not so much writer’s block as writer’s bramble patch. Urgent ideas and pressing thoughts tangle and snatch so that sentences veer off into nonsense or are overwhelmed with further thought. Forgive me.  I feel  that we need writers and thinkers more than ever at the moment. We need to write ourselves and we need to give those we teach the chance to know for themselves what writing can bring to their lives.

I shall begin with Writing Club: a joyousness of little girls busy with pens and paper (and far too much washi tape.) I have been running this after-school club for seven years and it has always been popular, particularly amongst the youngest children. When Emily and I started the club, we expected that it would attract mostly Key Stage 2 children and the first groups were a brilliant mix of older and younger children, including children who not yet writing in the conventional sense. It made us rethink our ideas about writing and we became the richer for it. That’s maybe something to write about on another day. Last week, because older children were off on important business, there were only five and six year olds in the group. We began with our own names.

I had seen a post on Sophie Blackall’s Instagram account which inspired my idea for the session. (Those of you who know me will know that anyone may choose to write something that is more important to them  at that moment. I simply like to have an idea ready for them, should they want it.) Sophie Blackall is an artist and maker of books for children. She had been working with a school and had been taken by the way the children had written their names with such flair and individuality - ELIZA had perched hearts on the top of each letter; Arthur wrote swooping ‘R’s; Iris underlined her name with an emphatic zigzag. I loved the way that Sophie Blackall had noticed these differences and drawn attention to them and had a feeling that it would be something Writing Club would enjoy.

I made two different folded book forms for the girls to choose from – a simple zigzag and a vertical flap book. I made my own examples and soon knew what fun it could be. I wrote my name on each page or flap – Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni – and found a different style each time I wrote it. I followed each name with something about myself: ‘Miss Jeni lives in a house full of books.’ (‘That’s got to be your house’, observed Maud.) ‘Miss Jeni loves to read.’ And so on.  Illustrations would follow.

They all wanted to do this task, beginning with the writing of their own names. There was that miraculous silence that falls when people are absorbed and then an outburst of giggling and singing, standing up to dance to their song, sitting down to write their names over and over. Of course, they made the task their own. Soon they were writing about each other and making books for their friends. Writing for the self and from the self. Our names are important. Writing in a community and for that community. Other people are important.  It’s one of the things I have been thinking about a great deal: that when we are teaching writing in primary and secondary schools, we do well to remember those we are teaching. Each individual: the language, experience and thinking that each one brings with them. Writing learned from the inside out. We can set up the conditions for them to write what is important to them. We do so within a community and, through writing, extend our experience and our experience of language and how writing can work.

Alone and Together

It is National Writing day 2023. What a good thing. It is a day for celebrating; and a reminder of all the pleasures and benefits of writing. 

Perhaps you already write regularly or it’s part of a plan you haven’t quite got round to. I think that much writing is solitary, and necessarily so. It is possible to celebrate quietly and alone. But since it is a National Day for writing, it seems to me that it would be a great idea to write with someone else. It might be with just one friend or a whole class of students. There is something transforming about writing alongside others and then sharing something of what you have written. There is a warmth, an exhilaration, a very special connection, in the quietness of writing and then the sharing.

Maybe you would like a starting point, a way in. Of course we can start with words, a list of them or a poem or piece of prose. Think also, about an action that allows for dreaming, wandering before writing. Make a fold, cut, take a line for a walk. Make a simple folded book, cut out a character or a small crowd of them, draw -something that you can see or something that arrives from your mind. The act of making creates a space into which pre-writing thoughts flow.

The six pages of a small book can suggest a form. As we cut and draw, we dream, letting the ideas unfold before the words hit the paper. It can be a quiet, meditative time that moves us from the busyness of the world to the inside and out again. Patterns emerge, a phrase or sentence comes to mind. We find ourselves letting the writing fall onto the page. We surprise ourselves.

When we come up for air and look around to see and hear what our companions have cut from card, what they have used to animate their writing and how their writing has unfolded, we are delighted. We learn, always, from hearing words read aloud; ours and theirs. I hope that you have time this week to sit down with one other, or with many, to write. And to hear each other’s writing.

One of the good things about having a special day to celebrate writing is the way it generates such a rich variety of ideas for writing. Start with First Story, the organisation which came up with the idea of this day, and play the roll the dice game. Choose one of the links on their website. Try Arvon or CLPE, the British Library or the Literacy Trust. There are more. Use the ideas now and save some up for later.

Because I wrote some things

NWP Director Jeni Smith reflects on the ownership of writing:

January has ended and I have not yet wished you a happy new year. So here we are: Happy New Year! I hope that the year ahead is good to you and that you have left behind all those early January resolutions and are forging ahead into an interesting February. The sun is shining through my study window, calling me to be out walking, reminding me that the windows need washing, making me think about all that I have not written in the last few months. And all that I have written, for my own eyes only.

In my last post, all the way back in October, I wrote about Writing Club, attended by some of the youngest children in the school. We are still meeting every week and our numbers have grown a little. It is a relief to have some older children in the group who can help with spellings and be, quite unselfconsciously, good examples of what a writer might look like. We can become very tangled up in thinking ourselves not proper writers because we have not published or appeared on anyone’s bestseller list. It seems presumptuous to call ourselves writers. But we do write. And it is a pleasure and a solace. Writing alongside each other, whether adults or children, reminds us of the many ways we can be a writer and we learn from each other. Writing Club is a highlight for those children who attend. I imagine that might be something to do with washi tape and stickers and watercolour pencils, but it also is bound up with making, composing for ourselves. Making a mark.

Everyone has the capacity to write and to use writing for their own purposes. Not everyone feels that. I fear that the seeds of self-doubt are often sown in school. Writing can all too often be connected with failures: to spell, to punctuate, to form letters beautifully or to choose words that the teacher considers sufficiently wowish. Writing is rarely easy and all those secretarial skills can present real challenges for the young writer. When young children are asked what is hardest about writing, they are more than likely to say that it is getting the words right, ‘trying to think about the words that match’. However, writing is also a feeling. I think we all need to feel we have the power to use our writing in any way we choose, and to shape it accordingly. As a Year 3 child told me recently: ‘Just be yourself and don’t worry if anyone else judges your writing bad; you are never wrong, it is your writing.’ There’s an echo of Peter Elbow in there. The reader and the writer are always right and always wrong. They are right about their own responses and intentions, wrong about the experiences and intentions other writers and readers bring to the work.

When we feel we own the writing, we can feel more open to changing it, to shaping it more carefully. We may also feel more nimble, more able to adapt a task and to take risks. We can choose when to keep our writing for ourselves and when it is for sharing. It can be a joyful thing.

What, for you, is the best thing about writing?

Here is a four year’s answer:

Because I wrote some things. I wrote “I love you mummy.”

All this is writing

I have been circling around this piece of writing for a while now. My recent reading has set me thinking – Simon Armitage’s Oxford lectures, Annie Dillard’s essays in The Abundance, Richard Mabey on nature writing, reflections on Hilary Mantel – but I continue to circle, unable to reach a satisfactory resolution. Sometimes writing goes like that: more time, more thinking, needed.

Then, in the last three days, I have had two glorious, joyous, hopeful face to face encounters. On Thursday, our school Writing Club met after school for the first time in several years (we have been squeezing into lunch times) and on Saturday, five of us from the Norwich Writing Teachers group met in person for the first time since January 2020. I have loved our on-line workshops. During the height of the pandemic, they seemed like a sacred space where teachers and, often, their children, met on screen against the background of home. The on-line workshops have allowed us to write with people from across the country. When time differences have allowed, we have even written alongside a teacher from Dominica. It has been, and continues to be special. But, oh, the pleasure in sitting around a small cafe table with our pastries and our cooling cups of coffee. We didn’t write. We talked. There was so much to say and conversation flowed in between and over itself in ways that a Zoom meeting does not make easy.

Our talk was of the classroom, of our reading and our writing, our hopes and ambitions and the obstacles that stand in our way. As always, I worry if we are not writing. Our notebooks and pens lay untouched. Rightly so. We orientated ourselves. We discovered how things had changed for us all, and how they remain the same; the importance of placing children at the centre of our thinking; the nonsense that pervades schools and stands in the way of growth, despite the rhetoric; the courageous head teachers who place children’s happiness at the forefront of their thinking; the ways that each person around the table finds ways to open up possibilities for those they teach; the ways we make reading and writing a special part of children’s lives.

On Thursday, I met with the three children who had signed up for Writing Club. It has always been a popular activity in the school and I am sure it will be so again. There were two Year 1 children and one from Year 3. As always we began with words. It never ceases to please me! Off we went, one word each: heffalump pizza amungus sketti bolognaisi.  That was so enjoyable and so quick that we did another round. Let’s do foods, I said, taking their lead: raspberry oranges curry apples. And then we did four more rounds: scrabble chess jigsaw bingo; swimming walking bobbling climbing; turquoise bobbly blue  (lots of giggles) pink gold; red shoes, my pyjamas, flower dress, woolly jumper. There is something exhilarating about compiling lists of words together. There is laughter and there are pauses for explanations (the pyjamas are hard to get on but she likes to wear them as soon as she gets home from school). We discover it is both funny and OK to say bobbly blue -and how good that is to say. Try it! There are stories within the single words. We see the fun of hearing our own words amongst the words of others.

The words became a great preface to the little books we were about to write. I had brought each child a small folded book and some bird stickers to decorate the cover. No matter how old you are, part of a writer’s pleasure is the stationery (read Hilary Mantel on stationery). And so we wrote our names and began to draw and write. I drew my son and daughter, because they are always goading me to say which child is my favourite. But food had taken hold amongst the  rest of the group: tomato pasta, pizza, egg -but not the slimy centre bit. They drew and wrote, providing a running commentary as they did so. Their talk unfolds the thoughts and experiences that underpin what they choose to represent on the page. It is true for us all, I think, that the words on the page rise up from the great underground caverns of our lives.

Writing Club comes at the end of a long school day. Before the time was up, we broke out the washi tape. Of course we did. And we continued to talk and shape our ideas and experiences. Reading, drawing, talking, laughing, choosing stationery, breaking out the washi tape.

As far as I’m concerned, all these things and many more are an important part of writing: indeed are writing.

A short history

Thank you letters – the post-Christmas commitment on small sheets of notepaper.

Not understanding what other girls did to have their writing praised.

Writing and rejection – short stories that were just too weird.

In many writing workshops over the last twenty years or so, we have asked participants to think of some highlights from their lives as writers. You may have been at one of those workshops. We hand out sticky notes and ask people to write a different memory of writing on each one. We usually ask writers to add their age at the time of the memory, though that isn’t compulsory. We are going to share what we write with others. We suggest areas that you might think about: learning  to write; teachers’ influences; the most important pieces of writing you have written; writing at home and away; the travel blog and the letter to an unborn child; the highs and lows; letters and e-mails; writing as the start of something and sometimes its ending; writing for the family, the personal, the academic; the all-important notebook and the momentous graduation to a handwriting pen.

When we share our writing we find that there are always things we have in common and reminders of things we had not thought of.  Always there are memories which are the unique and intriguing. In the individual and the collective we find the beginnings of our selves as writers and the experiences which shape us as writing teachers.

The power and pleasure that came from the one thousand word limit.

Writing reports – scrumpling and rewriting and blotting and rewriting.

Writing daily about teaching and the  classroom. The revelation of it.

At this point in the summer, as you settle into yourself, as you may already be looking towards the new autumn term, perhaps you could take a moment to reflect on our own history as a writer.

Note down some memories; five to eight would be a good start, more if you want. Perhaps you could draw a timeline. Live with it. More memories will come. When we are writing in a group, we often choose one incident to write about in more detail -you could do that. Or you could add to your headline memories: a potted history of your writing life gathered in brief moments. As we push for more elusive memories, we build a fuller picture. It has a bearing on how we write and how we teach.

                        Writing into friendship and romance  across an ocean.

                        Reading a poem aloud and listening as others talk about it.

                        Shaping the SED – writing that hits the buttons and uses the language.

                        Observing and writing about a classroom  – shaping the words to make it live again.

It is good to write your history alone – you have time and space. It is good to write your history amongst others. The talk that weaves between the writing brings different perspectives. It helps us see ourselves and to see the possibilities for our classrooms. More than ever these days, we need the strength of shared understandings. We need to know that we are not the only ones who are listening to those we teach and placing them at the centre. We need to know that we have deep understandings of writing and the confidence to share those understandings.

With that in mind, thank you, to all group leaders, who have kept on writing with others throughout the last few hard years, and a special hurrah, for the Whodunnit Group, who will be meeting, face to face, in London, next Tuesday. Do get in touch if you would like to join them.

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Daily

I have been considering the ways in which daily writing – and drawing - work on mind and body to shape us as writers: the value of morning pages, the discipline of a daily 1000 word target,  the practice of writing freely for a set amount of time, or for a defined number of pages, the poem a day challenge, the commitment to recording one moment from each day. Peter Stillman suggests we think of a journal as ‘a net for catching the shining particles of the day’, dust motes in sunshine, maybe. I have ditched the shining bit, and just kept the particles. I can often surprise myself with what I choose to write. And I have enjoyed drawing alongside the writing.

I just like the idea of noticing something every day and noting it down. I like the way it makes me look more carefully and how that carries into the next day, making me look out for things, changing my perspective.

Writing daily somehow, changes the way we write and think; the repetition, the regular commitment  both consolidates and surprises, it can shove you into having to find a different way round things, and it can allow you to fail and go back and keep on going back until you have found something that works for you. I find that when I commit to morning pages, my writing is strengthened. I feel it comes more fluently,  that I am more willing to experiment, that I am more agile. Freewriting has a similar effect. Writing for its own sake, writing without any audience but oneself in mind, makes way for playfulness, honesty, experimentation. Writing every day allows us to see what it is that we can do when we write. As we write without pressure, we may open up new possibilities for ourselves. We can try out stuff. We can lay down new writing tracks. We can strengthen hand and mind and imagination.

There is much to be said for the steadiness of a daily routine. August is a month when, for teachers, a different daily rhythm may emerge. Even if each day is filled with adventures, duties, catching up, letting go, there can also be time to create a small space for regular activity. Musicians and athletes know the necessary pains and consequent pleasures of regular exercise. A daily practice is fundamental for artists and thinkers of all kinds. It is an undertaking that shapes and strengthens.

It can set us free.

Summer Journal

First of all, apologies for my long silences.  No good reason, to be honest, but I am delighted to find, two days after a cataract operation, that the text on the screen is really quite dark and clear cut and not, as I thought, unnecessarily blurry. Perhaps it was that peering at a misty screen that was holding me back, even though I hotly denied it. So here I am.

Although I have been silent here, on this website, I have continued to write, alone and with teachers. I continue to see how writing for oneself informs the teaching of writing in powerful ways. I continue to find new pleasure in writing myself. Writing continues to help me think. Writing and drawing and saving ephemera helps me remember. I regret not writing more regularly about ordinary days. So I was inspired by the Foxes, a Year 5 and 6 class, as they created their own travel journals or holiday journals and I have created one of my own this summer.

We have made such journals before. Each one reflects the personality and potential activity of the maker. Many children fill them with their adventures; memories of a moment in time captured for the future. We choose our papers and the size and design of the journal. Some people, choose compact square shapes, to be tucked in a rucksack on a Lakeland walk. Others are more expansive, creating A5 and A4 notebooks with maps and pockets and different kinds of paper. Some focus on a particular holiday destination - slim volumes with maps of the place included, and others ambitiously gather enough pages and pockets to encompass the entire summer. Most of us choose to have two or three signatures in the notebook and we prefer thicker paper that will take watercolours, coloured inks or pastels. We plan to draw and write; to stick in photographs and entry tickets. Some of us may never start. Others will end up with a bulging collection of days out and projects at home.

You can find plenty of videos on line that will show you how to make a three or five hole bound book or you can simply choose a readymade notebook. I recommend Gwen Diehn’s The Illustrated Journal which has clear instructions for straightforward book binding and is full of suggestions and examples of ways to fill it. This kind of journal is very different from my own writer’s notebook, which is full of scrawl and quite a lot of nonsense, crossings outs, lists and the occasional cutting or bus ticket. I have always hesitated to take on an illustrated journal because it seems to me more public and, therefore, more self-conscious. However, this summer I have made a journal and have reached day seven.  I am finding it a peaceful, meditative thing to do. It is nice to draw and use colour and to stick in sweet wrappers and a pressed flower from a bunch my daughter sent me. It calls for a different kind of writing and being.

Many summers ago, a teacher writer created a beautiful summer journal from a Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore. The book itself was a lucky find in a second hand bookshop in the seaside town where she was staying. She transformed the book into a record of her holiday there. It was full of paintings and poems, maps and stories. It even contained a small compartment cut from the pages where shells could nestle. It was a beautiful object and a unique reminder of that time with her family.

May I suggest that you treat yourself to some quiet journal making? It can be whatever you wish it to be. More than anything it can be time for yourself. And, as you know, any kind of writing and making can find itself back into the life of your classroom. The website holds plenty of ideas to start you writing and drawing, so have a look. I decided to offer a small list of prompts for the month of August, just because I was playing with the idea of alphabets, and it is always fun to have a new list.

Gather a little stash of pencils and papers, colour and tape, scissors and glue. Set a little time aside. Have a lovely summer.

No ideas but in things

‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is the first  poem that Miss Stretchberry introduces to her sceptical class in Sharon Creech’s novel, Love That Dog.

So much depends ….

JACK

       Room 105 – Miss Stretchberry

            September 13

I don’t want to
because  boys
don’t write poetry.

Girls do.

…

September 27

I don’t understand
the poem about
the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
and why so much
depends upon
them.

If that is a poem
about the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
then any words
an be a poem.
You’ve just got to
make
short
lines.

Sharon Creech (2001) Love That Dog. London: Bloomsbury.

The ending of Creech’s book gets me every time. And now I am thinking about it, the last time I read it was the very week that the first lockdown was announced. I was reading with a group of Year 5 children and they had suggested we read all the poems (they are gathered at the end of the book) before we started on the story itself. It was an inspired idea for that group. We spent a giddily joyous hour reading and re-reading the poems and talking about them. Trying out different ways of saying them and noticing how they worked.

Who knows whether they finished reading the novel? I didn’t see them again, face to face, for more than a year. But we did continue writing and, as is routine with that class, we always begin with a list of words. And every time we do, we are reminded of their pleasures. In particular, we enjoy the naming of things. Specialist vocabulary: bit, bridle, breeching, tail comb, crupper. Proper nouns, familiar places, brand names: The Pightle, Lidl, Eye, Colman’s, Mitsubishi, Finbow’s Yard. Words that come directly from our daily lives:  mug, bicycle, travel card, flat white, Whatsapp, drains.

And just recently I came across this really delicious four minutes forty-seven seconds of video: No ideas but in things.

You can watch it over and over again to hear a fistful of poets talking about Williams’ poems, teaching us about poems: the breath of them, the line breaks, their mindfulness; Alan Ginsberg on the look and placing of them on the page, Kenneth Koch, enjoying ‘this cluttery, clanking sound’. I don’t do it justice. It is just very good to hear them speak.  ‘Why don’t you write about something nice, Dr Williams?’ and the good doctor himself: “I am a radical. I write modern poetry, baby. I’m an awful person.’

No ideas but in things, William Carlos Williams said. He noticed everyday things and put them in poems: the wheelbarrow, broken glass between buildings, chicken wire, barrel-staves. No one, he says, at the end of Pastoral, will believe this/ of vast import to the nation.  But it is. It wakes us up, makes us alert. Makes us pause. It values our everyday experience, the things that take up most of our time. It moves beyond the individual to shared understandings. It loves language. Miss Creech/ Stretchberry knows a thing or two. You could do worse than introduce her selection of poems to a class starting out with poetry.

A teaching journal

When I was a young teacher, I worked in two unusual and challenging schools. We were often working without a map and it was both terrifying and brilliant. Early on, Michael Armstrong, who was a colleague then, encouraged me to keep a journal. Every day, at four o’clock, I sat down with a cup of tea and recorded stories from my day. I wrote down things that bothered me, or puzzled me, or that I considered a success. Very often, I just wrote down things that had happened without really knowing more than that. Only later did patterns appear. I have been writing journals about school life ever since.

It is what I like to write and it is where writing, for me, is a record, a research tool, a means of thinking and a means of discovery. I find writing in this way utterly absorbing and it is this kind of writing that makes me feel most like a writer.

When I look back at the early journals, I am dismayed by their prim schoolmarmy flavour despite the wildness of the context Very often I was simply catching the moments, hoping enlightenment would come later. I was coy about my part in the procedure. My notes were often cryptic, missing out the detail which I have learned bring things alive and help me to make sense of what I am seeing. Slowly, I loosened up. Threads emerged. I felt able to speculate. And I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to talk, endlessly, about what we were doing; what students were teaching us. The talk remains essential. The writing catches the moment and allows thinking to unfold.

So I encourage you to keep a teaching journal. So very often it is assumed that writing means ‘being creative’; and ‘being creative’ means writing novels and poetry. For a teacher, writing about the life of the classroom is creative, is intellectually satisfying and is emotionally worthwhile. It is a way of making sense of what we and those whom we teach are doing. In making sense we create meanings and consolidate and develop our practice.

If that sounds too worthy, then shake yourself free of that idea. Just capture a story or two each day and see what happens.

This is the thing. Make a cup of tea and sit down. Open your notebook. Write the date and time and let the day come back to you. Write down what immediately comes to you. Sometimes, there will be one overwhelming event. Sometimes, a brief moment will have stayed with you -the way a child smiled, the hush as you read the last chapter of a novel, the surprising solution a child found to a maths problem, the emotions that surged when, yet again, Galahad the Restless could not settle to the task. .

Start by recording the story. Write down what happened. What words were spoken. Maybe what you felt and thought at the time. Then let the pen go. You may find yourself exploring one idea. You may find yourself writing down a list of small incidents. Be patient. Start with the aim of simply getting some details down. Let the events of the classroom and the writing itself lead the way.

One year my journal began in despair. Daily I reported a sense of failure, of making no headway, of students’ unfinished work and abandoned projects. I constantly questioned myself. Six months later, when re- reading the entries, I saw that much more had been happening than I thought. Although I felt at sea, the students were making headway. In every single abandoned attempt lay the seeds of what became major pieces of work during the next twelve months. I learned how some things come slowly and how important trust can be.

Start today. Use a school exercise book. See what happens.

Michael was an inspirational teacher and thinker. A collection of his papers and essays is available in this free e-book, Another Way of Looking.