What is The Write Book for your school?

The Write Book is a new Booktrust project that aims to support Year 5 and 6 teachers run whole-of-year writing projects inspired by children's books, providing an important link between reading and writing and enabling pupils to respond creatively to books. 

Before I take pen to paper, I read. I'm luxuriating in the movement of the words which are, blessedly, not mine. Into the notebook I am using for the fiction I'm writing, I copy paragraphs whose heft and cadence I can learn from. And some days, if I'm lucky, the very movement of my hand, like a kind of dance, starts up another movement that allows me to forget the vanity, the folly, of what I am really about - Mary Gordon

The benefits of linking reading and writing seem instinctively obvious: fan fiction is engaging a new generation of teens in writing; the instant read/write responsiveness of social media makes most of us writers every day, and, on school level, projects such as CLPE's 1998-99 research project Reader in the Writer and their current Power of Writing course emphasise the vital links between loving books and being inspired to write because of them. Countless authors such as Zadie Smith, Claire Wigfall and teen author Sarah J Maas have all recently recommended being an avid reader to be a good writer.

For Booktrust, working with schools to support the love of the written word as well as making a bridge from reading to writing just makes sense. We are experts in recommending great books and have run a phenomenally successful schools writing project with Everybody Writes. We know that primary schools generally achieve better results in reading than writing. We want to help narrow the gap in these two equally important areas.

The Write Book is an Arts Council-funded pilot project involving four primary schools over two years and includes a strong element of personalised guidance and creative support from Booktrust. Booktrust has a long history of creatively supporting schools through Children's Book Week, The Children's Laureate, Writing Together and the Everybody Writes project, which was evaluated by the University of Sheffield in 2009 as being highly successful in raising the confidence of pupils in relation to writing and raising attainment.

 The aims of The Write Book project are:

• Increasing teacher confidence in teaching creative writing
• Raising pupils' attainment in writing at Y5/6
• Increasing pupils' enjoyment of writing at Y5/6
• Creating a legacy for writing
• Linking reading and writing

The Write Book draws on the successful ethos of the Everybody Writes project, which promoted cross-curricular working, giving children authentic experiences to write about; writing for real audiences and taking writing beyond the classroom. We will be encouraging schools to use these proven techniques to help build a legacy for writing: that is, a sustainable future for writing; an ongoing focus on enjoying writing and engaging even reluctant readers and writers, and thoroughly embedding creative writing in the curriculum.

Even though we are starting work with just four schools, we see this as a pilot project which will become a much larger creative writing resource for teachers over the coming years.

The Write Book launched with a fabulously creative day in February with teachers from Swaythling Primary School in Southampton, Heaton Park Primary School in Bury, Claremont School in Cricklewood and Sandringham Primary School in Plaistow. Teachers loved exploring ways that books can inspire creative writing with children's author and creative guru Christopher Edge, and started thinking about the books they might choose to form the focus of their own writing weeks, to be held in the summer term.

I've just received the project proposals from schools and am delighted to see some brilliant ideas already from a lovely range of books, including A Midsummer Night's Dream-themed writing week in a forest and a trip to the BBC to inspire a book trailer film for Neil Gaiman's eerie modern classic Coraline. Schools will be writing up their projects as case studies at the end of the summer term, and we will showcase these on the Teacher section of the Booktrust website to help inspire other schools as part of the first phase of the project. Watch this space for more news on how The Write Book can inspire a whole new world of creativity.