With the help of the following free materials, encourage your pupils to enjoy writing and to win prizes for themselves and their schools, including, for the first time, interactive whiteboards from SMART Technologies.
This is the eighth annual Write Away competition, organised once again with the help of the National Association for the Teaching of English whose members organise the countrywide first phase of judging. One per cent of the thousands of entries will be submitted to a panel of TES representatives and NATE officials who will choose 20 for publication on the TES website.
Write Away is intended to support literacy at key stages 2 and 3 and to make writing fun. Each year up to 10,000 children aged seven to 14, from all over the United Kingdom and sometimes from international schools as well, send in their accounts of a person, place or incident important to them. The competition gives children a voice, a chance to express the complexities, excitements and disappointments of their lives.
On the following pages, newly commissioned pieces by the Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo, the Carnegie medal winner Jennifer Donnelly and the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year 2003, David Almond, join two of the winning entries from last year’s Write Away competition.
The 2004 submissions provided the usual pleasurable difficulties for the judges, but eventually 20 boys and girls were invited to enjoy a day at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, four overall winners were published in TES Friday magazine and all 20 on www.tes.co.uk.
Keep up the standards in 2005!