Hope Education’s Writing Competition Inspire your pupils’ creativity and win fantastic prizes!

Authors are often asked how to start writing, and the best answer is JUST START!

Authors are often asked how to start writing, and the best answer is JUST START!

Having a nice new exercise book and a special writing pen to write in it can also help too!

So, to get you and your pupils started on your creative writing journey, we are offering the first 1,000 schools a free starter set of 50 premium Oxford exercise books and 100 sheets of high quality writing paper worth £15.98!

Hope Education, a leading supplier of curricular and stationery resources, have teamed up with Scholastic and Oxford to offer you and your pupils a wonderful range of prizes for the best short stories.

Award-winning author Emma Barnes, whose new Wild Thing series is published by Scholastic, will be judging the best entries in three categories: Years 1-2, Years 3-4 and Years 5-6.

About the author Emma Barnes

Emma writes humorous stories about children getting into mischief, having adventures, falling out with their families and generally battling with the silliness and unpredictability of life. She also writes scripts for TV and radio. To find out more about Emma please visit www.emmabarnes.info. (IMAGE Hope-writing-comp-author-image 3)

Emma has kindly provided an extract from her new book The Wild Thing as inspiration for your stories, which you can read online here. We also provide some tips and reminders on how to write a brilliant short story, planning it carefully, organising the sentences and paragraphs and paying attention to vocabulary and punctuation.

Pupils are encouraged to think carefully, plan their stories, making sure there is a beginning, middle and end, using their premium Oxford exercise book, then write it out in their best handwriting, using the high quality lined writing paper provided in the starter set. Illustrations can be added but the stories will be judged on the quality and presentation of the writing.

If you miss out on a starter pack, don’t worry, you can still get up to 30% off selected stationery and curricular resources from Hope Education that are sure to get your creative juices flowing! Our English resources include storytelling scenes and maps to help your students imagine their characters and writers’ kits and journals to help them plan their writing in detail. Add to that our comprehensive range of handwriting pens, pencils, paper and exercise books from the best names in stationery and you have everything you need to get started!

There are three categories with different maximum word counts:

• Category 1: Years 1-2 (age 5-7): 50 words max
• Category 2: Years 3-4 (age 7-9): 50-150 words
• Category 3: Years 5-6 (age 9-11): 150-250 words.

Pupil prizes

First prize in each category will win:
A set of 20 story books, a signed copy of one of Emma Barnes’ books and a family cinema pass for 4 people worth over £160! The winning stories will also be read out on video by author Emma Barnes – a fantastic way to celebrate this achievement throughout the school, and a great keepsake!

Two runners-up in each category will receive:
A signed copy of one of Emma Barnes’ books.

School prizes

The winning school in each category will also receive a set of Scholastic’s English guides for the National Curriculum, worth over £210!

So what better motivation is there to get your pupils writing?

All you have to do is to get your class to write a short story, choose the best 12 entries, scan them and send them to competitions@hope-education.co.uk by Thursday 2nd April 2015. Don’t forget to tell us the names, ages and year groups of the pupils and indicate which category they are in.

To claim the fantastic FREE starter set of 50 premium Oxford exercise books and 100 sheets of quality lined writing paper, visit our competition page at Hope Education or simply call 08451 20 20 55 (available for the first 1,000 schools only). We are also offering up to 30% off selected stationery and curricular resources find out more here.