Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda makes a surprising discovery.

At last week’s UEA Writing Teachers meeting, Jeni Smith demonstrated how to make simple folded books. We used them to write gratitude lines and praise poems and reflected on how the spaces we had inhabited during lockdown had taken on new significance.

It was great fun, but I was a little disappointed. So often NWP writing meetings generate ideas that make an appearance in my classroom a few days later, but I couldn’t really see how to use this one. Great for primary colleagues, I thought, but not much use for my secondary students.

How wrong I was.

Cue Monday’s return to school and the staggered starts for different year groups - with even more staggered arrival at lessons due to covid testing. What to do with the students periodically appearing in small handfuls fifteen or so minutes apart?

Make books!

They seemed to love it. There were ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of appreciation as the books came into being. It was engaging and engrossing but also seemed to provide the perfect route back to writing.

Firstly, senior students in particular were grateful not to be plunged back into exam syllabus material straight away.

Secondly, the students enjoyed the creativity in design, and, with their newly-acquired expertise, showing more recently-arrived students how to do it. Spines and bindings became more and more colourful and original and moved far beyond the original slit design.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they provided the private space in which to reflect on what has been such a peculiar experience for many of us. As Sam Brackenbury explained in last week’s blogpost:

The pandemic, and the subsequent move to home learning, has shown the value of the writing communities that we foster and nurture in our classrooms. Children need shared writing sessions, that almost palpable energy which comes from writing together. They need discussion with their peers to hear how they bring meaning when interpreting, describing or reflecting so that they can broaden and deepen their own command of language and ways of seeing the world.

My desk was briefly filled with a whole library of ‘little books of lockdown’ (though they were all gone by Friday afternoon with students desperate to take their mini publications home).

Now to master the origami box to keep my books in…