This is an idea that I saw on Twitter, that a teacher had used in their year 6 class for persuasive writing. I thought I would try out this idea and adapt it to a year 4 class. I will say this, the children loved it, and it was all they spoke about for the following week.
The previous week, we had used The Day the Crayons Quit to look at letters: Structure, features, layout and purpose. The week after, I changed it a little. The chairs in the classroom had quit.
The children walked into class, to find all the chairs had quit, and had stacked themselves around the classroom. I had ‘BREAKING NEWS’ on the board, and the children’s reactions were brilliant. Some thought we were going to be on the news. Some didn’t want the chairs back, whereas most of them did. It was a mixed bag of reactions.
The chairs had written the class letters with several reasons for quitting, such as:
– children swinging on chairs.
– Their feet on the chairs instead of on the floor.
– Being scraped across the floor.
– Not being tucked under the table.
There simply was no way these chairs were coming back, unless the class persuaded them.
In groups, they gathered reasons as to why the chairs should return, along with how they were going to persuade the chairs to come back. In these groups, they would have a go at writing a draft letters to persuade the chairs to come back.
They read them out to each other. But the chairs did not return…
So they went off and wrote their own letters to the chairs, with own apologies and reasons for why the chairs should return. The children struggled with this, as they had to chairs to sit on whilst they wrote this (some used that as a reason in their letters).
This took up the whole morning, but all children stayed on task, and produced some amazing writing. The chairs also made a return after dinner!