WRITE AWAY IN 2020

Hello world!

Last year, I started an impassioned one-woman initiative to encourage the practice of daily writing in classrooms across Australia. I called my little initiative WRITE AWAY and you can read about it here. I was privileged to have many opportunities to speak about WRITE AWAY and about how to get students writing with enthusiasm and confidence at a number of conferences, staff meetings and school visits during the year. I urged teachers to give it a go, to try to squirrel out some time for kids to write freely and frequently in their own writing notebooks.

Many teachers told me that they were already using this strategy in their classrooms – and with great results – which warmed my heart. Many others told me they were keen to try. I received numerous messages from teachers telling me about the success of the initiative in their classrooms and I got to see many classrooms with kids writing enthusiastically in their notebooks. The excited glints in students’ eyes and that look of pride and possibility as they told me about their writing was heartwarming and actually quite exhilarating.

So … here it is, the beginning of a new school year and a new decade (and the 20th anniversary of me being a published author) and I am once again urging you all to consider the idea of WRITE AWAY and see if you can find a way to incorporate it in some form into your daily/weekly programs.

And for those students who sometimes need a visual prompt to get their creative juices flowing I am going to post a new visual prompt to my @adventuresinstory  instagram account every day for the month of February. There are already 64 visual prompts on the page to get you started.

Happy writing!

Sue

Image: @ TarasMalyarevich/depositphotos