Posted on: 29/06/2023
At Literacy Tree, writing and reading for pleasure is at the heart of everything we do. At this time of year, as we start to move away from end-of-year data drops, it feels an ideal time to bring the focus back to celebrating reading and writing for their own sake, away from the lens of assessment. From gallery walks to author’s fayres, we’ve pulled together ten top tips for how to celebrate your book-based journey at the end of the school year.
1) Pitch perfect
Bring together all the books you’ve explored across the year (through reading, writing or both) and place them around the classroom. Get children to vote on their favourite choices, perhaps by using voting cubes to place next to the book of their choice. Once voting is completed, create campaign groups of children who voted for the same text to pitch why this book was their favourite to the rest of the class in a Dragon’s Den style pitch. Who will be the overall winner?
2) Mystery extracts
Select extracts or quotes from different texts studied across the year– can children match up the extracts to the books and justify their reasoning? Why not complete this as a pop quiz style challenge in groups?
3) Re-discovering discovery points
Remind children of the excitement of all your discovery points by looking back over photos of how you started off your sequences. You could even bring out some of the objects used in the discovery points – can children link the object to the book? This is a great way to remind children of the texts they’ve explored throughout the year, as well as an opportunity to revisit those inference and summarising skills.
4) Writing showcase
Get children to look through their books and select their favourite piece of writing to perform; even better, why not record it? This could be in an audio book format or a video performance. Afterwards, create a class showcase of recordings to share with parents. This could be taken a step further by asking children to select their favourite pieces of written publishing to create a gallery walk through a class writing museum – you could organise the ‘exhibits’ by book to create a walk-through gallery of favourite outcomes. After the event, the pieces could be turned into a class display.
5) Publishing
It goes without saying that we are huge advocates of the value of publishing writing throughout the year, both through instant and planned opportunities. Not only does this create a heightened sense of audience and purpose, but it is a perfect way to celebrate writing and foster a feeling of pride in children’s work. The end of the year can be a great time to revisit favourite published pieces, or maybe even allow children to publish a favourite piece that perhaps they didn’t get as much time to work on as they would have liked earlier in the year. Double page spreads can be a great way to publish non-fiction writing, and writing on tracing paper over the top of illustrations is another favourite. Share with children how other schools have chosen to publish similar pieces to give them inspiration – the work samples on our site and our Twitter page are a great place to start for this!
6) Reading tree
As a class, create a ‘reading tree’ using the front covers of all the books you have studied across the year as the branches. Collaboratively, select children’s pieces of writing inspired by each of the books you have explored and make these the ‘leaves’ of the tree, coming off each of the books, so that every child has their own ‘leaf’ on the class tree. This is a brilliant way to celebrate all the books you have explored, and the range of amazing writing created together.
7) Look how far you’ve come
As teachers, it can be a really valuable and rewarding exercise to do the ‘September flick-back’ to the very first pieces of writing carried out to show the incredible progress from then to now, regardless of those letters or codes you’ve inputted into your data drop. Encourage your children to do the same and they will be astonished at how far they’ve come!
8) Author’s fayre
Give each child a table with an author plaque and their writing books to share – get them to select particular pieces they are proud of and be prepared to share them with anyone who attends their stand. This could be done with parents and other staff to make it more inclusive to allow everyone to celebrate their writing, even if they don’t have a parent or carer in attendance.
9) Author link-ups
Sharing work with authors is a brilliant way to celebrate writing and using social media such as Twitter can be a great way to achieve this. We know first-hand how excited children in our schools get when an author re-tweets or replies to a Tweet about their writing based on one of their books – so many of our authors adore seeing children’s writing inspired by their books (just ask Benjamin Zephaniah, Joseph Coelho and Sharna Jackson!). What better feedback to get than a class of children passionately writing based on a character or plot you’ve created as an author!
10) Tweet us
We love nothing more than seeing the amazing outcomes across our schools, and we know that the children love seeing their work being shared with the big wide world online. Tweet us photos of your children’s favourite outcomes – we’d love to see their work and give them some celebratory shout-outs!
We hope these suggestions give you some useful ideas for different ways to celebrate the amazing writing and reading your children have accomplished this year. Taking the time to celebrate their achievements and allowing them the space to feel pride in the literary journey they have been on will set them up to head into their next year with excitement and anticipation of the books their next teacher has in store. We look forward to seeing your celebration photos coming in!
