What is 5SC?

The Five Sentence Challenge, or 5SC is a community of students, teachers and schools who share their writing with each other (and the world) each fortnight.

Each fortnight, an amazingly supportive and innovative teacher from the UK, Mrs Skinner, posts a visual prompt for students to use to stimulate their writing on the 5SC webpage. The students look at the prompt and think about the stories and ideas they want to write from the picture. They can write a description of all the things they see, or use their imaginations to create a story using just a few characters or objects in the scene.

Five sentences might not seem like a lot to an adult, but it a very good length to allow students to focus on their personal writing goals around punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, and style.

After they type and edit their writing, it is published on our special GNLS Writers blog so that students, teachers and parents from our community can read the writing. We also welcome friendly visitors from anywhere in the world. The student blogposts are also linked to the official 5SC website so that they can be easily discovered by other teachers and students participating in the challenge.

Students read the work other other writers in our own school and around the world, and can leave comments or ask questions to encourage other students to keep writing. Teachers from our school and other schools may also leave comments on our students work to encourage them and give them feedback to improve their writing. We also invite parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends to leave comments for students. There is nothing more motivating for a young writer than to know that people are not only reading their work, but enjoying their writing as they develop their own personal style and continually improve their spelling, vocabulary, punctuation and sentence structure.

A team of supportive mentors, known as Team 5SC, will also read the students’ work and leave an encouraging comment. Team 5SC is made up of teachers, retired teachers, parents, school principals, and other people who are willing to give up a short time each week to encourage young writers. This is a great way to contribute indirectly to your own child’s learning, because without these volunteers, the program won’t work. If you are interested in supporting young students achieve their writing goals, there is more information on joining the team on the 5SC website.

We really hope that now you have found our GNLS Writers blog, you will take some time to read our work and leave an encouraging comment.