It was created by Emma Ralph, a primary teacher of 17 years, based on her time-honoured classroom experience. Transforming the way KS1 children learn to write, this unique tool will fill your class with independent, confident and capable writers – almost overnight!
What Does Mighty Writer Do?
Learning to write is a complex experience for children. While some adapt well to this journey, others struggle, and risk being left behind. Mighty Writer breaks the process down into manageable chunks, enabling the development of key literacy skills, so children of all abilities can begin to write with confidence.
Don't just take our word for it! Find out more about the buzz around Mighty Writer by reading our testimonials.
"Mighty Writer has quite literally transformed my children's writing. Not only is it interactive, visual and fun, but it targets the technical aspects of teaching writing in such a clever way, it's simply genius! My year 2 children were completely sound with using a range of sentence starters and using accurate punctuation within 2 weeks of using Mighty Writer. There isn't a child (or adult) in my class who doesn't do a little dance each time the Mighty Writer comes out! Thanks so much for creating such an effective, brilliant writing resource."
Andrea Pearce, Year 2 Form Tutor and Head Of English, St Wystan's School.
What's Included with Mighty Writer?
The Mighty Writer set is packed with bright, engaging and tactile tools. Here’s what you’ll find in the set, and what each element does.
The Mighty Writer Mat
At the core of the Mighty Writer experience is a large mat. You can either lay it on the floor and gather your children around, or hang it up on the classroom wall. Either option is ideal for group work, or to engage the class as a whole.
Sentence Mats
These mats come in 3 different colours to represent the beginning, middle and end of story. There are short mats and long mats to enable children to use sentences of varying lengths.
Image Tiles
If the mat is a blank sheet of paper, then the tiles will tell the story! Grouped into engaging themes, the Mighty Writer tiles depict images of locations, living things, objects, people and more, to help illustrate the imaginations of your pupils.
Punctuation and Symbols
To help children to develop increasingly complex sentences as they progress, Mighty Writer comes with various punctuation tiles as well as symbols to represent different kinds of words, helping them to visualise and learn correct sentence structure.
Below is a guide for each of the symbols:
Sentence openers and conjunctions
The sentence openers have been carefully chosen to provide a basis of options for you and the children to use. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a valuable reference point, and regular exposure to these words will enable children to build up their vocabulary.
The co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions have been chosen to provide variety when creating more complex sentences. Blank word tiles allow you or the children to suggest your own ideas.
Toolbars
Attached to the edges of the mat are the Mighty Writer toolbars, which help you to organise the various kinds of tiles into their different functions or themes.
Take a look at our online shop to discover the various themed toolbars that are available to help your children tell their stories.
How Does It Work?
Mighty Writer will engage the whole class in a unique, story-writing process using tools that are both tactile and visual. This helps to shape their understanding of punctuation and grammar, making the story blissfully simple to transcribe. Here’s how.
Create
All children have powerful imaginations, but their storytelling abilities may vary. To help every child express their ideas, they can use a range of visual and tactile tools – image tiles alone can be used, or a more advanced child may be encouraged to use sentence mats and arrows for structure, too. Whichever resources are appropriate, the children can use Mighty Writer to tell a terrific tale of their own, or to retell one that they already know.
Scaffold
Using the relevant tiles, teachers can help to illustrate the visual story with sentence openers, conjunctions and punctuation, as well as symbols to represent adjectives, emotions, verbs and adverbs. Arrows between sentences will give the story a natural flow that children can easily follow; meanwhile, they can become gradually more involved with punctuation and grammar, as their confidence grows.
There’s no pens, paper or permanence, so children will naturally feel more inclined to get involved and give challenging tasks a try.
Absorb
Mighty Writer’s kinaesthetic method of learning helps to ingrain complex principles, which many children would otherwise need to grapple with for some time. As soon as they pick up their pencils to transcribe, it’ll become clear how much the children have remembered from the tactile process of putting a story together with Mighty Writer.
In fact, you’ll see a difference in the whole class’s enthusiasm, ability and understanding, almost overnight.
Write!
As your class’s confidence with storytelling soars, so will their enthusiasm for writing. Transcribing their Mighty Writer stories will soon become their favourite part of the school day.
To make the process even easier, we have developed a series of downloadable worksheets mapping out various lengths of story, with handy reminders for sentence starters and punctuation. Find them in our Teacher Zone.
We guarantee that Mighty Writer will have a positive impact on your pupils’ learning.
Check out our video testimonials to find out more!