Engaging Reluctant Writers with Technology - Using GIFs as a writing stimulus with Pages or Keynote.

As an Apple Coach, I’m always looking for meaningful ways to integrate technology into my teaching to engage students and enhance learning. One area where this has had a real impact is writing—particularly for those children who find getting started the hardest part or who are perfectionists and don’t like to see their work looking messy with the many edits it can take to turn a basic sentence into something special. To address this, I’ve introduced a 5-minute GIF Writing Warm-Up in my Year 4 classroom. Using Apple technology, this activity helps spark creativity, encourage risk-taking, and build confidence in writing. Each session begins with a fun and engaging gif, shared directly to iPads via Apple Classroom or displayed on the interactive whiteboard. Students paste the image into Pages or Keynote and follow our Stretch a Sentence scaffold to build a more developed piece of writing. Here’s how the scaffold works, using a thunderstorm gif as an example: • Who – A cloud. (Student writes what they see – a noun and determiner) • Doing what – A cloud raining. (A verb is added) • When – This morning, a cloud was raining. (Focus on fronted adverbials) • Where – This morning, a cloud was raining above my house. (Preposition inserted) • Why – This morning, a cloud was raining above my house as a storm was brewing. (Use a conjunction) The final step is to ’make it interesting’ where students are encouraged to enhance their writing using adjectives, a simile, personification - anything that we’ve been working on in our grammar lessons. Here’s one example of the outcome: “This morning, a dark, grumbling cloud, like an angry beast awakened from its sleep, poured rain over my house as the sky threw a wild thunderstorm tantrum.” This simple warm-up builds momentum for the rest of the lesson and has proved to be a highly effective way to engage even the most reluctant writers.

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