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Writing Irresistible LEADS with Grade One Students

I have been reading Australian author, Kate Grenville’s book, ‘The Writing Book – A Practical Guide For Fiction Writers.’ Grenville writes about leads and reminds us that the beginning of a piece of writing needs to be irresistible . Further to this she reminds the reader that it doesn’t matter where you begin a piece of writing- just begin! Grenville quotes Ezra Pound who said, ‘It doesn’t matter which leg of the table you make first as long as it stands up in the end.’ The writer’s aim is to glue the reader to the page. Grenville also makes the observation that sometimes you need to write the whole story before returning to the start in order to write a great beginning or ‘lead’ for it. Recently I have been working with groups of Grade 1 writers alerting them to the various ways in which writers ‘lead’ the reader deeper into their stories. Initially we looked at their own writing samples and I asked students, what did they notice about the words being used in their story leads? Th...
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Teaching the Developing Writer the Benefits of Rereading

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This week I have had more time for reading (term holidays) and so I revisited an old writing friend. I picked up Nancie Atwell’s ‘ Lessons That Change Writers’ and began rereading. I like to go back to authors I trust. Atwell’s messages about writing are laden with timeless value. Nancie writes, ‘Writing is as much an act of reading over what we have written as it is drafting new writing.’ These words set me to thinking. A lot of student writers are not consciously skilled where the act of rereading is concerned. For this reason it needs to be drawn to their attention. We need to show them how and why rereading is an important skill to add to their writing armoury. They need to see it explicitly modelled and valued by a proficient writer. This way it is more likely to be adopted. A lack of consistent and conscious rereading is frequently the thing preventing the writing young writers produce rising above the ordinary. Learning the habit of rereading and applying it in a conscious ...
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Moving Student Writing From the Notebook to Publishing

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Revised July 2026 Young writers need to experience every phase of the writing process and yet it is publishing that frequently gets squeezed or curtailed. Either that, or it gets the 'fast food' treatment and every child's published work looks alarmingly the same. Publishing and the student writer are short changed. In many classrooms much emphasis is directed towards gathering entries in the Writer’s Notebook so much so that there is a further danger this will begin to establish itself as the primary focus for writing both in the minds of teachers and students.  It could therefore be easy to lose sight of the purpose of the Writer’s Notebook. The Notebook’s primary function is to provide a place for writing to  begin . The notebook is to the writer, what the sketchbook is to the artist. Across the pages of the notebook we gather writing ideas - experiment, trial, and start to play with words. It is the place where potential writing projects find their...
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Slice Of Life Story-The Trials Of A Left Handed Writer

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Amazingly I learnt to write using my left hand. An achievement against the prevailing beliefs of the day. My very first teacher saw it as her mission in life to ‘fix’ the poor, wretched little boy suffering from what she clearly diagnosed as left handed disease. She must have thought, 'This child must be re formatted! If he remains left handed he will be forever condemned to writing in a scrawl that no one will be able to read. Ugly hand, ugly hand.' ...They tried to say it couldn't be done, it mustn't be done. They took the pencil out of my left hand and placed it in my right hand. It felt unnatural. It felt weird. It was not right. More to the point it was not left. I was not about to conform. At least they didn't try tying my hand behind my back. Watch me I said. I may be an oddball, left handed scribbler but I am a determined oddball. I mean how boring would the world be if everyone wrote with their right hand? So I dug my toes in –and my hands to...
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Learning How to 'Zoom In' When Writing

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It is important for young writers to understand that not all parts of a story are equal. There are parts through which a writer moves quickly, and important parts where the writer slows down and lingers a while. This is where the writer might intensify the action or reveal the character’s reactions in greater detail. Young writers need to know that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of the author. The author consciously zooms in. The writer uses a magnifying glass to view a part of the story more closely; to focus on a moment and to slow down time. When an important part of the story is enlarged upon, it   is a signal to the reader, that this part of the story is important. The strategy of ‘zooming in’ goes by many names: ‘exploding a moment’ ‘magnifying a moment’, ‘hotspot’ ‘snapshot’, ‘adding detail’ or ‘slowing the action.’  What ever the name, the idea is the same. The author writes in a way that expands a significant part of the story with the intentio...
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