We
do not write a story in our books every day as used to happen in the past. Sometimes we will work on a piece of writing
over 2-3-4 days as we craft a piece of text that we can be proud of. Sometimes we will write in different forms –
e.g, a letter, a poem, retelling a story with correct sequence. Writing is not
always in our exercise book – it may be on paper. Writing may be with a writing
buddy.
Writing
is a very complex process and Trudy Francis, C21 Learning, who was the leader of literacy professional development for Oaklands teachers over the past 2 years, has shared with us her wisdom about
many aspects of being effective writing teachers, such as using emotional hooks
to have children really engaged in the writing process from the start, helping
children to use metacognition and think like a writer, encouraging students to
think about their reader as they write, teaching children to use the fast word
cards for words that they are not sure of.
We
are also working on presentation of our writing including correct letter
formation, leaving finger spaces, beginning with a capital letter, using
fullstops in the correct places, having lower case letters in words with
capitals only at the beginning when needed.
Another writing
expert who we learn from is Gail Loane.
“I’ve Got
Something to Say”
Leading young
writers to authorship
We want our young people to grow up knowing
that writing is an important and deeply satisfying life skill, one that helps
them make more sense of themselves and their world, one that helps them to
communicate effectively. Much more than a skill, writing is the creativity of
each child making itself known through the role of author. Unfortunately, too
often writing becomes merely an exercise in ‘getting words right’, or writing
to teacher-prescribed tasks. Authorship is much richer than that, it is a means
of describing, pondering on, clarifying, questioning, and celebrating aspects
of their lives.
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