Mighty Writer

using appropriate vocabulary, structure and characterisation as well as many other important elements. This often results in lack of motivation and enjoyment for the children, and ultimately to slow progress and under achievement. This can impact on adulthood. It is also complex for the teacher as they seek to model and teach key concepts in clear and concise ways in order that children become increasingly independent and competent. Mighty Writer transforms the way children’s writing is taught and learnt and enables young children to become independent, confident, capable writers. It uses a unique method to allow children to freely create their story, while scaffolding enables them to effortlessly transcribe the tale with accurate grammar. It simplifies the complex process of learning to write and enthuses children of all abilities. Mighty Writer has been developed and tested in schools and with individual children across the south of England. We have had incredible results. Teachers have reported great enthusiasm about the progress of children with significant improvement in writing sentences and use of punctuation. Children started creating more complex stories, transforming reluctant writers into those who avidly enjoy the process. Their improvement, sense of achievement and self-esteem had all accelerated. Mighty Writer was also very flexible in that it can be used to teach different genres, be it retellings (both known stories and factual recounts), non-fiction and poetry
Mighty Writer allows teachers to employ the techniques they already use in a simple and comprehensive manner to allow children to master the skills of writing, speaking and story planning. This ensures that teachers are not faced with an increased work load of learning a new method of teaching, but rather have all they need in one place and can approach the teaching of writing employing strategies they already use. There is currently nothing on the market similar in nature to this. Principle features
The mat provides a space for children to create their story. Around the perimeter are various toolbars. The left toolbar contains sculpted connectives and conjunctions. The right toolbar contains sculpted punctuation. The top tool bars contain images. The standard image toolbar (which will be contained in the original pack) consists of illustrations of locations, living things, objects and environments. Image tool bars (which can also then be purchased separately) are also designed to link specifically to topics across the curriculum in order to support the teaching of writing on particular themes. Finally there are “sentence tiles” which allow children to create a sentence per tile. The tiles are coloured green, orange or red to denote the beginning, middle and end of the story. The teacher is able to model and demonstrate each part of the retelling, planning, editing and creating process. They control the type and number of images on the toolbar, the number of connectives and other symbols to focus the teaching. Depending on the ability of the child, they can start their story by simply creating a story map of images on the mat. Introducing the sentence tiles allows the children to form structured sentences which can become increasingly complex as children’s ability develops. The tiles are sculpted to fit the connective words and the punctuation (see felt prototype above). Hence the connectives and the punctuation form scaffolding around each sentence, teaching the child to use a capital letter, connective and punctuation. Furthermore there are other symbols that include adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc. Tiles can be placed anywhere on the mat and the story flows with the use of arrows between sentences. The child can then build the story sentence by sentence, all with coherent structure. They are encouraged to revisit, amend, improve and expand the story as much as possible. Everything is visual, easy and fun to use. With immediate effect, children can create a story with a comprehensive structure which makes sense and flows. See felt prototype below. They can retell this story as many times as they need to, or the teacher feels appropriate, until they are completely confident with it. The next step is to allow the children to transcribe the story. Of course, the scaffolding around each sentence makes it easy for the child to successfully transcribe the whole creative, fun story with capitals, connectives, adjectives, verbs and punctuation among other elements. To allow the teacher to enable pupils to work individually or in pairs, they will be able to print off A4 /A3 paper mini Mighty Writer©. Each A4/A3 sheet will have a number of sentences printed on it along with a symbol key to allow children to create their own stories and images using the same concepts and symbols as on the main mat. These are differentiated to meet the needs of different learners. Who is Mighty Writer for? Mighty Writer is aimed at teachers of 4-7 year olds and of all abilities who want to maximise the writing ability of their children. Parents can also easily use Mighty Writer and work with their children. In fact the children soon get the hang of it and quickly want to work alone. It is also excellent as a tool to those who have English as an additional language and Special Educational Needs.