This part of the site is for educators. Here you will find classroom resources like printouts and other writing activities. You will also find a simple spreadsheet that can be used to sign up your whole class.
What is this site for?
Celebrating Stories was created during Spring/Summer lockdown 2020 with the aim of allowing young people to step out of their circumstances with their own creative endeavours. It’s a place where they can be creative and communicate with one another (in a moderated space).
Writing stories (and creating stories in other ways) offers people the chance to vent difficulties, venture into fantasy, or simply share interesting ideas.
We offer writing prizes in different age categories so there is a competitive option for those who enjoy that.
Alternatively, they can simply enjoy the community feel of the place and learn more about story making from seeing what works well in the stories of others.
A Writing Prize for one of your Pupils
Once each quarter we assess the stories on the site and award a prize to one contributor from each age category. We utilise ‘like’ buttons on the site to help us with our decision. The button is set up so that any individual site visitor can only ‘like’ a story once. However, just because a story has the most ‘likes’ it will not be a guaranteed winner.
We will also take into account a selection of other factors in our final choice of winner and we may also request the help of guest judges as we come to our final decision.
Sign up a whole group at once
You can easily sign students/pupils up individually in the ‘Sign Up‘ section of this site. However, we do offer the option of adding a class all at once. To keep things easy for you we request that you provide a list of names for your pupils. Please click this link and fill in the CSV file with your class list, we’ll do the rest for you.
Privacy
Depending on school policy regarding privacy, you may prefer to provide only first names in your list. We will also need a teacher email address to use for account setup.
As site policy, we do not recommend the use of user names that contain identifying words like the user’s home town, real names, or even the name of their school.
Awesome User Names
If your pupils would like to choose their own user names please include these in your list. We can also create auto-generated user names for your class. Let us know which you would prefer.
To keep things simple we normally add a common theme/word for all users from one class. The idea here is that pupils from a particular class will be able to find each other easily on the site if they know their class word.
For example, a recent class addition has user names that all start with the word ‘forest’. Now, whenever pupils from this class log in they will be able to find work by their classmates easily.
A longer-term writing project
The Celebrating Stories website is a very open space. Members can share all sorts of content and most forms of content will be eligible for the quarterly writing prize. We anticipate that most content will take the form of short pieces of fiction and/or pictures.
However, you may also choose to work together on a larger writing project as a class. We have an eight to ten-week writing course designed around key components of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.
This is a class-led activity that leads them through the full process of creating a comprehensive piece of work (either a book, an exhibition, or some other group effort).
The result will be something substantial that each participant can take pride in and which teachers could utilise in various school-wide activities, including school fundraising efforts.
If you would like more information about this programme, please contact us using the contact form on the site.