Product reviews for Opening Doors to Quality Writing

We all can understand the challenge involved in getting all our students to produce quality writing, but when they do, it truly lifts the soul and you remember the reasons why you went into teaching in the first place. Some writing tasks will really inspire pupils, whereas others just fail to connect, making the teaching process feel like an onerous process. This can be down to various factors: uninspiring engagement with texts; pupil confidence; or even the teaching process itself, so when a resource comes along that helps produce quality writing, then many teachers will pounce on the opportunity to try new things with their pupils.

This is where these extraordinary books by Bob Cox come into their own. Inspired from an eccentric mix of easily available classic books all the units within the books promise to make links from understanding the challenging texts to maximising the huge potential for quality writing. The 6-9 book explores texts such as: The Hippocrump by James Reeves, A Child's Thought by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Five Children and It by E. Nesbit. Whereas the 10-13 book features classic texts including: Mementos by Charlotte Bronte, Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The accompanying commentary with each text provides cues, tips and questions to explore the texts in an engaging and deep level, all cumulating in providing pupils their “wings to fly”, by developing their work into memorable creative writing.

Each book contains a CD, providing extracts and illustrations to help begin opening doors in your classroom. These books should be explored by any teacher who supports pupils aged from 6-13 wanting to widen the books they examine during a school year whilst, at the same time, opening up a rich world of classic texts which could be lost to another generation.