Tuesday 28 August 2012

Writing Ideas with Raewyn

Focus: Planning and variety of sentence structures teaching ideas.

Vcop - building on vocabulary online tool

Think literacy - Cross - Curricular Approaches

Effective Literacy - Years 9-13

Monday 20 August 2012

Moving into Writing Groups

Well we have been in groups for 5 weeks now.  This seems to be working well.  However, I have had my most successful teaching when working with students pieces of writing.  I need at least 40mins with the writing group to be able to re work the writing.  So I am dropping down to seeing one group a day where we re-work and share write together.  I am finding it hard to plan to far ahead in writing as they are now doing more writing on their own choice.  So the lessons come from the sharing.  More formative yes!!! I have goals of what each group is working on.  However sometimes a piece that a student has written leads more to a different writing strategy.

By moving to one group for writing I am then able to conference with the group longer and meet their needs. Evidence well here goes:

Target student wrote: (1st attempt no teaching)
Right Choice day is a day of fun that keeps children happy.  If you get 2 detentions you won't be able to go to right choice.  When right choice day comes you will choose what activity you want to part in.  Wrong choice is bad because it provides writing, dictionary work and you can't talk.  At the end of the day you would be wet or be wanting to watch the same movie again.

We then had a session on being selective on our ideas and what was the message we wanted our reader to get.

Target student then wrote
Right Choice day is a day of fun out of the class and keeps children happy.  Children have to have good behaviour to go to the day of fun and games.  There is games and loads of fun like wheels, sports, water fights and movies.  You have to be good like using your manners and coley hearts and treat others the way that you want to be treated.  Right Choice is for people who have a good attitude towards school.  At the start of the day you get a choice of what you would like to do! At the end of the day you always want to go back!

He has been more selective of relevant ideas and his next step would be now to organise them in a logical order within his paragraph as he still jumps about.