Now, usually, I am not a fan of the felt tip in my classroom. Many children have been sent back to their seats, shoulders dropping with a disappointed air, having been informed that I do not accept felt tips in exercise books. The ink sinks through the paper. When you make a mistake, it’s irretrievable. The yellow never stays sunny yellow. The reasons are many.
But. It has to be said that there is something about them that is immensely attractive, and especially so for children. The colours are bright and cheerful, the marks they make (when new to new-ish) are bold and assertive. And, thanks to the scratchy nature of their contact with paper, the sensory feedback you get when you write with them, similar in nature to a good, soft-but-not-too-soft pencil, is strong.
So, after quelling my qualms about inky fingers, and in the interests of reluctant young writers (for a number of reasons), I have come up with ways in which the felt tip can be used to, if not aid illustration (I will leave that to my more artistic colleagues), the aid the development of writing.
Contain the mess
There is no way around the fact that felt too is messy, so I recommend you gather together some exercise books that don’t matter. Someone always has some odd, small number of empty books hangi around their cupboard somewhere. Seek these out and put them to good use. This way the children can go through the pages, experiment, smudge and generally make a mess and it won’t matter.
Make patterns
I often like to allow two colours (and children love to choose their combinations, haggling over an extra colour, or two, or three), and this makes felt tip writing the ideal medium for finding the patterns in words the children are learning to spell.
Make a wordle
Who needs a wordle when you can write your own on a big piece of paper and your teacher puts it in the wall for everyone else to see your handiwork?
Self/peer marking
Not got any highlighters? Use a felt tip to underline (in the correct colours) instead.
Free writing
Sometimes, just the fact that you are being allowed to write in felt tip is enough to get even the most reluctant little writer to write pages and pages and practice lots and lots of spellings. All over the page in lots of different sizes.
Keep the best ones tidy
There is always a tray full of old felt tips – and a great job for those children who are longing to help you during playtime is to check which ones still work and throw out all the ones that don’t – but keeping a pot of the very nicest ones for writing makes all the difference to young reluctant writers, especially if they know that being allowed to use them is a special treat.
Just make sure, especially if you are a roving teacher, that you label everything and put them safely away in a place where none of the other adults in the school know about. And make sure the children put the lids back on.
These are just a few of the ways you can use felt tips for writing. I’m sure you can find lots more uses of your own.
Class Teaching Tips 