A writing group is a great way to establish a writing culture in your school. This page features a guide on setting up a writing club, tips on planning, games and activities, evaluating the impact of the club and sustaining it.
Once your writing club is up and running, you might be interested in some of our other resources:
- Do you have the next Lenny Henry or Sarah Millican in your writing club? Try our Comedy Classroom resource produced in partnership with the BBC
- Cressida Cowell's Free Writing Friday resources have some great tips for free writing and getting the creative juices flowing
We will continue to update the page with real examples from schools around the UK. To share the achievements of your writing club, please email us.
What is Everybody Writes?
Everybody Writes is a universal approach to writing, encouraging a love of writing for all children and increasing the confidence of all teachers in devising original and creative ways to engage children in writing. However, by offering children hands-on experiences to write about and by establishing real audiences for children’s writing, the Everybody Writes approach imbues writing with a relevance and immediacy that makes this approach particularly effective in engaging the interest of reluctant writers as well as giving the most able writers the opportunity to shine.
Key principles
- Taking writing beyond the classroom: into the playground, community and world of work
- Giving children hands-on experiences to write about
- Finding real audiences for children's writing
- Exploring writing across the curriculum
You can use these principles to create an Everybody Writes project in your school. It could involve staging the discovery of dinosaur bones in the playground to trigger a whole-school newspaper writing project; running a series of after-school workshops for parents and children to write and illustrate a family history book; or setting up a lunchtime blogging club to track the progress of a favourite football team in the Premier League.
Find out more about Everybody Writes.