2017 07 07 memb resource The Diary Writers Toolkit
The Diary Writer’s Toolkit A National Literacy Trust Membership resource
We all tell personal stories in our diaries, letters, blogs, and other social media. Some people even manage to produce a full memoir or autobiography later in life. This membership resource explores how teachers can use diaries to inspire pupils to write their own memoirs or to ask about their family’s own personal narratives. Personal, autobiographical writing allows young people to express themselves, share their lives, and for many, provides a safe place to explore identity and a sense of belonging. This toolkit contains a host of ideas and activities to support your school in using diaries as an introduction to autobiographical writing and building bridges to help literacy development through family and community engagement. The National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey 2015 included focused questioning about diary writing.
20% of young people said they write in a diary outside class at least once a month, however this proportion has declined steadily since 2010 when it was 25% Girls are three times more likely to be diary writers than boys and younger pupils are more likely to write diaries than older ones (nearly 20% at KS3 and only 11% at KS4) There is very little difference between pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds.
Children’s and Young People’s Diary Writing in 2015. National Literacy Trust, November 2016.
Getting started – inspiration My Teenage Diary, BBC Radio 4 Some of these radio programmes are hilarious. See if you can track down Chris Packham drawing on his teenage journals to talk about his obsessive, young naturalist’s behaviour. Your own reluctant, boy writers may be inspired to write diaries when they realise they do not have to be about friends and parties and fashion. Clips of recent episodes are available here.
Classic diarists across the curriculum History Samuel Pepys – Pepys’ diary is an epic, running to many volumes. But it is full of period detail, some risqué sections as he was a great admirer of women, and plenty of references to food and feasts of the time. It is often used a resource in primary history about the Fire of London as he was a witness. However, it is also worth studying for its literary merit.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017 T: 020 7587 1842 W: www.literacytrust.org.uk Twitter: @Literacy_Trust Facebook: nationalliteracytrust The National Literacy Trust is a registered charity no. 1116260 and a company limited by guarantee no. 5836486 registered in England and Wales and a registered charity in Scotland no. SC042944. Registered address: 68 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
Anne Frank – Needs no introduction as her diary is already widely taught in secondary schools. But teachers may not know about: Rywka Lipszyc a young Polish girl whose diary was unearthed in the ruins of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1945 by a Russian doctor, Zinaida Berezovskaya. She took it with her back to the Soviet Union and after her death the diary was passed on to her son and subsequently granddaughter along with other memorabilia. Finally, in 2008 the granddaughter contacted the local Holocaust Center in San Francisco to offer them the diary. The last entry in the diary contains the following passages written in literary Polish; they were Rywka's final reflections on the beauty of the natural world in the time of sorrow: Litzmannstadt Getto, 12 IV 1944
Łódź Ghetto, 12 April 1944
Ach, jaka cudowna pogoda! [..] I właśnie teraz gdy mi się nasuwa ta myśl że jesteśmy wszystkiego pozbawieni, żeśmy niewolnikami, wtedy całą siłą woli staram się ja odgonić i nie psuć sobie tej chwilki radości życia. Jakie to jednak trudne! Ach, Boże, jak długo jeszcze. Myślę że jak już będziemy wyzwoleni to wtedy będzie dopiero dla nas taka prawdziwa wiosna. Ach, tak jest mi już tęskno do tej wielkiej i drogiej Wiosny...
How beautiful the weather is today! [..] A thought came to my mind that we are deprived of everything in this ghetto, we are nothing but slaves; with all my willpower I am trying to push these disturbing thoughts away, not to spoil my little moment of joy. It is so hard! How long, O Lord? I think that the real spring will come only when we get liberated. Oh, how I miss this dear and truly grand Spring... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rywka_Lipszyc
The Diary of Rywka Lipszyc was published in English in 2014 by the Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco Holocaust Center and is available in the UK from Harper Collins too.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Sociology What about reading part of a diary of research for a lesser known book by a familiar name? It might inspire pupils to go back to their families and ask about difficult jobs they have done or places they have lived. This excerpt about Sheffield comes from George Orwell, The Road Had a very long and exhausting day (I am now continuing this March 4th) being shown every quarter of Sheffield on foot and by tram. I have now traversed almost the whole city. It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen. In whichever direction you look you see the same landscape of monstrous chimneys pouring forth smoke which is sometimes black and sometimes of a rosy tint said to be due to sulphur. You can smell the sulphur in the air all the while. All buildings are blackened within a year or two of being put up. Halting at one place I counted the factory chimneys I could see and there were 33. But it was very misty as well as smoky – there would have been many more visible on a clear day. I doubt whether there are any architecturally decent buildings in the town. The town is very hilly (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set unevenly to gives horses etc. a grip. At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars. Huge jets of flame shoot periodically out of the rooves of the foundries (many working night shifts at present) and show a splendid rosy colour through the smoke and steam. When you get a glimpse inside you see enormous fiery serpents of red-hot and white-hot (really lemon coloured) iron being rolled out into rails. In the central slummy part of the town are the small workshops of the “little bosses,” ie, smaller employers who are making chiefly cutlery. I don’t think I ever in my life saw so many broken windows. Some of these workshops have hardly a pane of glass in their windows and you would not believe they were inhabitable if you did not see the employees, mostly girls, at work inside. https://theroadtowiganpier.wordpress.com/ to Wigan Pier diary entry for 3 March 1936.
Geography Captain Scott – Another famous diary of its time, covering the course of his (unsuccessful) expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole. In a similar vein is Ernest Shackleton’s diary of the 20 month expedition to rescue himself and his crew from the Endurance, the ship that was crushed by sea ice in 1915. See an example of a year 9 student’s creative response to this diary is on the Shackleton Foundation’s website here.
Food Technology The Great School Bake Off Recipes can be a great source of stories. Where did the dish come from? Who handed it down? How exactly did your grandmother cook it? Can you ask pupils to record stories of cooking disasters or stories of triumph? All accompanied of course by the recipe itself and a photo to illustrate the end results or a photo of the cook themselves. There is an example,
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
‘We love to eat’ column in the Guardian newspaper every Saturday which provides an endless source of ideas and styles.
We love to eat: Great-grandfather Cyril’s jacket potato Ingredients: Potato Extremely hot cooking fireplace Salt Butter My great-grandfather was a kind, lanky miner whose intelligence never left him. I have an old black and white photograph of him driving a crane, and he still looked the same by the time I met him. By then, he was devoted to his wife and still lived fairly independently after she died; he continued to go for long walks, staying trim, and dressed modestly to the very last. I remember his lilting “Jiw Jiw” (Good God), a very Welsh saying, whenever he was remotely impressed or surprised by anything. In his last years, we were able to show him smartphones, which brought out a flurry of “Jiw Jiws”. One of the things he was proudest about having was a proper fire, in which he used to poke and prod and cook the best jacket potatoes in the world. A modest dish for a modest man. The potatoes had a kind of smokiness, and reminded you that the best things are often the simplest. You can introduce anything to a jacket potato, just as you could introduce anything to this brilliant, hardworking man. Charles Trotman https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/31/family-life-an-exotic-holiday-in-1960saberdeen-thunder-road-great-grandfather-cyrils-jacket-potato Students could be encouraged to produce something similar and send it to the paper; they pay £25 for every one printed. Or why not self-publish an anthology of pupils’ work using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Work can be published in digital and print and parents and the wider community can purchase their own copies with profits going to the school.
Art Lots of well-known artists have also been diarists. There is an opportunity here for a crosscurricular project. Take a look at the inspirational examples of Frieda Kahlo or Leonardo da Vinci on the Flavorwire website. There is also the beautiful Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady which may persuade reluctant journal writers that there are multimodal ways to record their world.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Memoirs from diverse communities In order to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to explore the influence of their own family and community on their learning, you could introduce excerpts from one of the following books. Jeanette Winterson needs no introduction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the ‘true‘ story of her upbringing, which updates the fictional version originally told in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The other two books both provide insights into British Asian communities and their family life. Safraaz Manzoor is particularly amusing writing about the relationship with his father and his love of Bruce Springsteen. Whilst Satnam Sanghera uncovers a huge family secret about mental illness. The first chapter of poet Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road can be downloaded from the publisher’s website. Greetings from Bury Park, Safraaz Manzoor (Luton) The Boy with the Top Knot, Satnam Sanghera (Wolverhampton ) Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? Jeanette Winterson (Accrington) Red Dust Road , Jackie Kay (Scotland /Nigeria)
You can order all these titles from Browns Books for Students and receive 30% discount as a National Literacy Trust member.
Country diaries We are mainly a country of urban dwellers, but perhaps we overlook the fact that that there are still many children being educated in small, rural schools and the diaries that reflect their lives are perhaps less well-known. The Country Diary column in The Guardian is a good starting point for inspiration. These are easy for students to imitate as they are short and usually have one simple theme or topic related to wildlife, the landscape or people who work in it. Another inspirational autobiography for country dwellers is A Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, a Cumbrian farmer. In the book he reflects on his family history, his own reluctant school days and his journey through books to university and his multiple careers as writer, Herdwick sheep breeder and UNESCO consultant. An example can be found here.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Perhaps the best known country diarist is Dorothy Wordsworth. Her writings helped her brother William remember specific views and scenes and inspired some of his best known poetry. Some of her journal pages can be seen via the Wordsworth Trust website. It might also lead to an interesting discussion about 19th century spelling! August 30th, Saturday Morning. I was baking bread, pies and dinner. It was very warm. William finished his Inscription of the Pathway, then walked in the wood; and when John returned, he sought him, and they bathed together. I read a little of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I had a headach and went to lie down in the orchard. I was roused by a shout that Anthony Harrison was come. We sate in the orchard till tea time. Drank tea early, and rowed down the lake which was stirred by breezes. We looked at Rydale, which was soft, chearful, and beautiful. We then went to peep into Langdale. The Pikes were very grand. We walked back to the view of Rydale, which was now a dark mirror. We rowed home over a lake still as glass, and then went to George Mackareth’s to hire a horse for John. A fine moonlight night. The beauty of the moon was startling, as it rose to us over Loughrigg Fell. We returned to supper at 10 o’clock. Thomas Ashburner brought us our 8th cart of coals since May 17th. Dorothy Wordsworth
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
We all tell personal stories in our diaries, letters, blogs, and other social media. Some people even manage to produce a full memoir or autobiography later in life. This membership resource explores how teachers can use diaries to inspire pupils to write their own memoirs or to ask about their family’s own personal narratives. Personal, autobiographical writing allows young people to express themselves, share their lives, and for many, provides a safe place to explore identity and a sense of belonging. This toolkit contains a host of ideas and activities to support your school in using diaries as an introduction to autobiographical writing and building bridges to help literacy development through family and community engagement. The National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey 2015 included focused questioning about diary writing.
20% of young people said they write in a diary outside class at least once a month, however this proportion has declined steadily since 2010 when it was 25% Girls are three times more likely to be diary writers than boys and younger pupils are more likely to write diaries than older ones (nearly 20% at KS3 and only 11% at KS4) There is very little difference between pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds.
Children’s and Young People’s Diary Writing in 2015. National Literacy Trust, November 2016.
Getting started – inspiration My Teenage Diary, BBC Radio 4 Some of these radio programmes are hilarious. See if you can track down Chris Packham drawing on his teenage journals to talk about his obsessive, young naturalist’s behaviour. Your own reluctant, boy writers may be inspired to write diaries when they realise they do not have to be about friends and parties and fashion. Clips of recent episodes are available here.
Classic diarists across the curriculum History Samuel Pepys – Pepys’ diary is an epic, running to many volumes. But it is full of period detail, some risqué sections as he was a great admirer of women, and plenty of references to food and feasts of the time. It is often used a resource in primary history about the Fire of London as he was a witness. However, it is also worth studying for its literary merit.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017 T: 020 7587 1842 W: www.literacytrust.org.uk Twitter: @Literacy_Trust Facebook: nationalliteracytrust The National Literacy Trust is a registered charity no. 1116260 and a company limited by guarantee no. 5836486 registered in England and Wales and a registered charity in Scotland no. SC042944. Registered address: 68 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL
Anne Frank – Needs no introduction as her diary is already widely taught in secondary schools. But teachers may not know about: Rywka Lipszyc a young Polish girl whose diary was unearthed in the ruins of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1945 by a Russian doctor, Zinaida Berezovskaya. She took it with her back to the Soviet Union and after her death the diary was passed on to her son and subsequently granddaughter along with other memorabilia. Finally, in 2008 the granddaughter contacted the local Holocaust Center in San Francisco to offer them the diary. The last entry in the diary contains the following passages written in literary Polish; they were Rywka's final reflections on the beauty of the natural world in the time of sorrow: Litzmannstadt Getto, 12 IV 1944
Łódź Ghetto, 12 April 1944
Ach, jaka cudowna pogoda! [..] I właśnie teraz gdy mi się nasuwa ta myśl że jesteśmy wszystkiego pozbawieni, żeśmy niewolnikami, wtedy całą siłą woli staram się ja odgonić i nie psuć sobie tej chwilki radości życia. Jakie to jednak trudne! Ach, Boże, jak długo jeszcze. Myślę że jak już będziemy wyzwoleni to wtedy będzie dopiero dla nas taka prawdziwa wiosna. Ach, tak jest mi już tęskno do tej wielkiej i drogiej Wiosny...
How beautiful the weather is today! [..] A thought came to my mind that we are deprived of everything in this ghetto, we are nothing but slaves; with all my willpower I am trying to push these disturbing thoughts away, not to spoil my little moment of joy. It is so hard! How long, O Lord? I think that the real spring will come only when we get liberated. Oh, how I miss this dear and truly grand Spring... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rywka_Lipszyc
The Diary of Rywka Lipszyc was published in English in 2014 by the Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco Holocaust Center and is available in the UK from Harper Collins too.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Sociology What about reading part of a diary of research for a lesser known book by a familiar name? It might inspire pupils to go back to their families and ask about difficult jobs they have done or places they have lived. This excerpt about Sheffield comes from George Orwell, The Road Had a very long and exhausting day (I am now continuing this March 4th) being shown every quarter of Sheffield on foot and by tram. I have now traversed almost the whole city. It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen. In whichever direction you look you see the same landscape of monstrous chimneys pouring forth smoke which is sometimes black and sometimes of a rosy tint said to be due to sulphur. You can smell the sulphur in the air all the while. All buildings are blackened within a year or two of being put up. Halting at one place I counted the factory chimneys I could see and there were 33. But it was very misty as well as smoky – there would have been many more visible on a clear day. I doubt whether there are any architecturally decent buildings in the town. The town is very hilly (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set unevenly to gives horses etc. a grip. At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars. Huge jets of flame shoot periodically out of the rooves of the foundries (many working night shifts at present) and show a splendid rosy colour through the smoke and steam. When you get a glimpse inside you see enormous fiery serpents of red-hot and white-hot (really lemon coloured) iron being rolled out into rails. In the central slummy part of the town are the small workshops of the “little bosses,” ie, smaller employers who are making chiefly cutlery. I don’t think I ever in my life saw so many broken windows. Some of these workshops have hardly a pane of glass in their windows and you would not believe they were inhabitable if you did not see the employees, mostly girls, at work inside. https://theroadtowiganpier.wordpress.com/ to Wigan Pier diary entry for 3 March 1936.
Geography Captain Scott – Another famous diary of its time, covering the course of his (unsuccessful) expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole. In a similar vein is Ernest Shackleton’s diary of the 20 month expedition to rescue himself and his crew from the Endurance, the ship that was crushed by sea ice in 1915. See an example of a year 9 student’s creative response to this diary is on the Shackleton Foundation’s website here.
Food Technology The Great School Bake Off Recipes can be a great source of stories. Where did the dish come from? Who handed it down? How exactly did your grandmother cook it? Can you ask pupils to record stories of cooking disasters or stories of triumph? All accompanied of course by the recipe itself and a photo to illustrate the end results or a photo of the cook themselves. There is an example,
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
‘We love to eat’ column in the Guardian newspaper every Saturday which provides an endless source of ideas and styles.
We love to eat: Great-grandfather Cyril’s jacket potato Ingredients: Potato Extremely hot cooking fireplace Salt Butter My great-grandfather was a kind, lanky miner whose intelligence never left him. I have an old black and white photograph of him driving a crane, and he still looked the same by the time I met him. By then, he was devoted to his wife and still lived fairly independently after she died; he continued to go for long walks, staying trim, and dressed modestly to the very last. I remember his lilting “Jiw Jiw” (Good God), a very Welsh saying, whenever he was remotely impressed or surprised by anything. In his last years, we were able to show him smartphones, which brought out a flurry of “Jiw Jiws”. One of the things he was proudest about having was a proper fire, in which he used to poke and prod and cook the best jacket potatoes in the world. A modest dish for a modest man. The potatoes had a kind of smokiness, and reminded you that the best things are often the simplest. You can introduce anything to a jacket potato, just as you could introduce anything to this brilliant, hardworking man. Charles Trotman https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/31/family-life-an-exotic-holiday-in-1960saberdeen-thunder-road-great-grandfather-cyrils-jacket-potato Students could be encouraged to produce something similar and send it to the paper; they pay £25 for every one printed. Or why not self-publish an anthology of pupils’ work using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Work can be published in digital and print and parents and the wider community can purchase their own copies with profits going to the school.
Art Lots of well-known artists have also been diarists. There is an opportunity here for a crosscurricular project. Take a look at the inspirational examples of Frieda Kahlo or Leonardo da Vinci on the Flavorwire website. There is also the beautiful Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady which may persuade reluctant journal writers that there are multimodal ways to record their world.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Memoirs from diverse communities In order to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to explore the influence of their own family and community on their learning, you could introduce excerpts from one of the following books. Jeanette Winterson needs no introduction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the ‘true‘ story of her upbringing, which updates the fictional version originally told in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The other two books both provide insights into British Asian communities and their family life. Safraaz Manzoor is particularly amusing writing about the relationship with his father and his love of Bruce Springsteen. Whilst Satnam Sanghera uncovers a huge family secret about mental illness. The first chapter of poet Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road can be downloaded from the publisher’s website. Greetings from Bury Park, Safraaz Manzoor (Luton) The Boy with the Top Knot, Satnam Sanghera (Wolverhampton ) Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? Jeanette Winterson (Accrington) Red Dust Road , Jackie Kay (Scotland /Nigeria)
You can order all these titles from Browns Books for Students and receive 30% discount as a National Literacy Trust member.
Country diaries We are mainly a country of urban dwellers, but perhaps we overlook the fact that that there are still many children being educated in small, rural schools and the diaries that reflect their lives are perhaps less well-known. The Country Diary column in The Guardian is a good starting point for inspiration. These are easy for students to imitate as they are short and usually have one simple theme or topic related to wildlife, the landscape or people who work in it. Another inspirational autobiography for country dwellers is A Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, a Cumbrian farmer. In the book he reflects on his family history, his own reluctant school days and his journey through books to university and his multiple careers as writer, Herdwick sheep breeder and UNESCO consultant. An example can be found here.
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
Perhaps the best known country diarist is Dorothy Wordsworth. Her writings helped her brother William remember specific views and scenes and inspired some of his best known poetry. Some of her journal pages can be seen via the Wordsworth Trust website. It might also lead to an interesting discussion about 19th century spelling! August 30th, Saturday Morning. I was baking bread, pies and dinner. It was very warm. William finished his Inscription of the Pathway, then walked in the wood; and when John returned, he sought him, and they bathed together. I read a little of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I had a headach and went to lie down in the orchard. I was roused by a shout that Anthony Harrison was come. We sate in the orchard till tea time. Drank tea early, and rowed down the lake which was stirred by breezes. We looked at Rydale, which was soft, chearful, and beautiful. We then went to peep into Langdale. The Pikes were very grand. We walked back to the view of Rydale, which was now a dark mirror. We rowed home over a lake still as glass, and then went to George Mackareth’s to hire a horse for John. A fine moonlight night. The beauty of the moon was startling, as it rose to us over Loughrigg Fell. We returned to supper at 10 o’clock. Thomas Ashburner brought us our 8th cart of coals since May 17th. Dorothy Wordsworth
All text © The National Literacy Trust 2017
