The Story Behind the Tweet

Not all our ideas are our own. Here's another we found on Twitter:

@alanpeat @waitrose real story, but so many ways you could use this #constrainedwriting pic.twitter.com/OItoy8Z0Xn

— nina (@ninalouise213) 30 May 2016

Nina posted the above Tweet and we immediately loved the idea. It's taken a few weeks to find the opportunity to try it out, but now we have and it worked quite well. It certainly engaged a group of Year Fives who just about know how Twitter works and certainly hear about and see Tweets in various media they see.

Here's what we did:

Firstly, I considered looking for an intriguing Tweet (which I may do in the future), but I didn't and instead created my own, fictional Tweet, using lemmetweetthatforyou:

I read the class the original example from Waitrose in Nina's Tweet and then showed them the fictional Tweet. I informed them that it was fictional and I even went to the bother of checking that the @Mentions don't currently exist on the site. 

Challenge 1: explain what the Tweet's about. Challenge 2: write in a similar style to Waitrose. Challenge 3: explain it in exactly 140 words. 

We completed our writing in the Count Words & Characters app and then posted the finished stories to a Padlet wall. 

We've written in the past about other forms of restrained writing: Two Sentence Stories, Stories in a Tweet, 100WC and others...