Keeping children engaged and learning in writing during school closures. Whose work is it anyway? Imagine a Year 6 classroom in the run up to the end of the year.
A teacher, trying to gather the last of the evidence for supporting Teacher Assessment on the 30th June decides to set one final task of writing a fictional narrative. This isn’t a “cold task”. Instead, the children watch a film that tells the story of a child who ‘learns his lesson’ about unkindness, through some incident of kindness that happens to him. The children are all to write a similar tale, giving their own incident as the turning point in the tale. Mother of Dragons. Question time!
How to create a class of happy and successful writers. For many years, schools across the British Isles and the wider world have adopted my approaches to teaching children to write with flair and style.
Most children’s writing improved by 2 to 3 years in the first year of using the techniques but — more importantly — many children’s attitudes changed from being reluctant writers to loving writing and calling it ‘the best lesson in the week’. So, what makes it such an attitude and achievement changer? Children love the 35 minutes of fast, fun ‘games’ and activities to embed the main principles of effective sentence construction with a far more enriched vocabulary, followed by up to 45 minutes of sustained, silent writing.
Featherstone Primary School - Writing Exemplification Material. Moderation: Writing Y3, Y4, Y5. IPEELL: using self-regulation to improve writing (re-grant) This page covers the second (effectiveness) trial - which tested a scalable model of IPEELL under everyday conditions in a large number of schools.
To read about the first (efficacy trial) - testing whether the programme could work in schools under best possible conditions - click here. ‘Self-Regulated Strategy Development’ (SRSD) aims to develop writing skills by helping pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their writing. SRSD has delivered consistently positive results in trials in North America. local_library Literacy accessibility Key Stage 2. Whole-class feedback: improve the curriculum, not just the pupil. This is part of a series.
Click here to read the first post, and here to read the second. In the previous two posts, we’ve looked at how feedback should be specific and actionable, but also designed in such a way that it can generalise to future tasks. But sometimes, you will read work with misconceptions that are too complex and deep-rooted to address in one lesson. My best lesson: developing persuasive writing skills using toys. By Niki Tighe Keeping your class on top form in writing lessons is a challenge, especially once they reach the top end of primary school.
Mark making areas to motivate your writers - Pobble - Medium. Developing early writing skills is essential to instil a love of writing.
For this, providing the opportunity is key: activities don’t need to be planned if plenty of resources are available for the pupils to access. These mark-making areas are sure to give you inspiration for your classroom and get your class writing. Kapow! Teachers as Writers Research Report 2017 FINAL. National Association of Writers in Education. A NAWE Research Report into the Writers-in-Schools Ecology NAWE's three-year research programme explored the effectiveness of writers-in-residence working in schools.
The project involved the placement of writers in nine schools across England (four primary and five secondary) over nine academic terms between September 2006 and July 2009. The key questions were: p1bjo7c692cll1lce17p8k2q1b38d. The Writing Revolution in the classroom: post 1 – Hearts and Minds.
Writing in Science: Guest post by Hochman and Wexler. That Boy Can Teach. When you looked round your school how did you know it was the one for you?
What were the tell-tale signs that it was going to be a good place to work? Those are the questions that I asked a whole host of teachers who love their current place of work. I wanted to find out from people how it felt looking round a school, and being interviewed there, which they subsequently went on to enjoy working at. In their answers there are resounding echoes and although I’ve roughly categorised them there is plenty of crossover in what they say. So, here’s what to look for when you visit a school you’re thinking of applying to for a job: A Warm Welcome "A warm welcome from the staff and happy content-looking students. " - @resayer "As I walked through the doors, the office staff were laughing and joking then I got a really warm welcome. Just a Feeling. This document serves as a general guide to the form. The long and the short of GDS in Year 6 writing. The title of this blog is back-to-front.
We're in the final weeks of academic spring - that whizzy dash of a term - so time is relatively short in terms of taking on board advice relating to end of year statutory assessment. It should be the short and the long of GDS writing – but that just sounds wrong. So why “the long”? Essentially, we need to fight back against the short termism of the past two years. The nature of this year's framework, and its dissemination has allowed some space for deeper thought and discussion with colleagues in schools and on training courses. Short term and long term views. National Literacy Trust report Children and young peoples writing in 2017 18. What can you practise in English lessons? Over my last two posts I’ve argued that, contrary to popular opinion, English is not a ‘skills based’ subject.
In fact, what appear to be skills are actually composed on many thousands of individual components of knowledge organised together as schema. In my last post I tried to demonstrate that practising ‘inference skills’ won’t actually help students get better at making inferences, and that this ability depends on what they know about a text and about the domain of English more generally. In this post I will attempt to reclaim the concept of practice in English lessons from the confusing quagmire in which it appears to be slowly submerging. Practice makes permanent, not perfect; whatever we practise, we get better at. The Writing Revolution. A wide-ranging debate on how to best teach writing begins here on Tuesday, September 25. In 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy. Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade.
During her elementary-school years, she got more than 100 hours of tutoring, but by fourth grade, she’d fallen behind her classmates again. 1000+ Words to Describe Foot - Adjectives For Foot. Loading you some adjectives... Won't be much longer! :) Below is a list of describing words for another word. You can sort the descriptive words by uniqueness or commonness using the button above. Sorry if there's a few unusual suggestions! Handwriting matters. Some years ago, during the interview for a role as Head of English in a secondary school, all the candidates were asked to speak about what we would prioritise if we were to get the job.
I have no memory of what I said, but I vividly recall one of the other candidates saying he would focus on improving students’ handwriting. My bland inanities resulted in me getting the job; he didn’t make the cut and was sent home after lunch. How we laughed. At the time it struck me that focussing on improving students’ handwriting as a secondary English teacher was an absurd waste of time. After all, who cares how neat their handwriting is? The other reason people dismiss the importance of good handwriting. ‘Yes, but it’s more important that we focus on their reading skills’ ‘Yes, but is this their own writing?’ ‘You should be concentrating on improving the quality of their writing, not how it looks.’ I’ve heard many versions of the above over the last few years whenever the subject of good handwriting crops up. For the record, I am all about the high expectations in terms of presentation and handwriting in particular; I’ve found children’s ability to read, write and spell MASSIVELY improve when they are taught and then made to practise the basics until their previously scrappy handwriting is transformed.
OK, OK, it’s not the be all and end all. Control. Analysis – Short-burst writing in the Talk for Writing sequence – Talk for Writing. Maria Richards, Talk for Writing Trainer. Year%203%20WritingTargets.pdf. Year%203%20Reading%20Targets.pdf. 0110-sample-Curricular-Target-Sheets.pdf. Yr3_Decimal_System_CF_Bookmarks_v2.3_PrimaryTools.co.pdf. Decimal System for Writing - PrimaryTools.co.uk. Overview The Primary Tools Decimal Assessment System has been designed first and foremost with children’s needs at heart.
It is a complete assessment system for writing, reading and mathematics from year 1 to year 6 that includes Assessment Sheets, Target Bookmarks and a powerful Tracking System. Bird on the Steeple: Big Rant about Big Writing. This article has been updated since I wrote it after Ros Wilson contacted me via Twitter, I am editing the post to incorporate her comments and will state again that these are my personal views. The green text indicates changes I have made. The grounded opinions I express are simply that. The other night I was being childish about Big Writing and its creator, Ros Wilson, on twitter. Year%203%20Subject%20Planner%20for%20year.pdf.
500 Words 2017 learning resource pack. Research Ed 2017 – The Wing to Heaven. This was the fifth national Research Ed conference, and in my mind they’ve started becoming a bit like FA Cup Finals or Christmas – recurring events that start to blur into one. “Oh, South Hampstead – was that the one where Ben Riley from Deans for Impact visited and it all kicked off about grammars?” “No, that was Capital City 2016 – South Hampstead 2015 was the one where Eric Kalenze visited and where James Murphy taught us the Maori word for green.”
Etc. Primary English Education. After questioning, modelling is one of the most useful pedagogical tools available to teachers. In this post we delve into our satchels and explore ways we can improve the modelling of writing; so that it is both fun and effective. Playing silly teacher. Primary English Education. Building Children’s Vocabularies. 'How blogging improved my Year 1s' writing skills' “Has Doreen been on yet?”