Using words to describe

We visited the bush last week and played "Hide and Seek". The children were excited and were able to give be some words to add to our planner. After looking through the words given I discovered a real lack of depth to their words - words like fun, nice, noisy etc.

So today I was given the opportunity to re-visit the bush and add some more words to our planner. We went outside into the bush situated along side our school again. It had been raining hard yesterday and the area was damp and rather chilly. The children were wearing mainly shorts with a sweatshirt. With the help of the Teacher Aide, we took the children blindfolded and made them stand in places on their own where they couldn't hear each other and waited...

It was interesting, a couple of children had to look, some stroked the trees around them, some stamped the ground and some shouted. So we 'released' them and asked them to tell us how they felt, what did they hear, did they smell anything and so on. We had prompted them before hand to think about these elements before we took them on their travels.

It was like pulling teeth, they didn't have many words for cold, (like the wind was whipping through the trees and the Teacher Aide was turning blue!). Some of the children were rubbing their legs and rubbing their arms but still they could only come up with words like cold, really cold...
After getting some words out of them and it was beginning to rain we went inside to write some synonym webs for cold and scared.

After the children came back to class, I asked a colleague for some resources around words and what she used to develop the language for her children who were struggling with writing as well. As we have been given some more allowance on our photocopying budget I have gone a bit mad.

Lots of laminating tonight, hopefully it will help tomorrow when we make more synonym web for describing words for out Hide and Seek writing.

Weebly

This is the link to my class weebly where we share learning and teaching that is occurring - Weebly

Reading about Visual Dyslexia

The Visual Dyslexia Solution

Inquiry - How do I help my struggling writers?

 I have selected 8 children  to work with using the ALL programme. This is a programme where the children are exposed to guided teaching for a period of at least 170 minutes - 200 minutes per week. This will happen for 15 weeks with the expectation that the children will move a year's progress - A JUMP START. The children are exposed to more oral language, scaffolding, any assistance that the Teacher deems they need.

So, after selecting 6 children with advice and knowing that 2 others are on the fringe and would benefit with extra support, I have 8 children in my ALL group. The selected children were given an e-asTTLe writing test - this was a cold sample, a picture cue and time for brainstorming and then writing for 40 minutes and 5 minutes editing. The expectation was the children would write a piece of descriptive writing. Of these selected children 3 are diagnosed with dyslexia, one who wears rose-coloured glasses to help her with visual dyslexia.

As part of the preparation for ALL - the children were all surveyed to find out how they feel about writing and how the feel about being taught writing.

The children are given a special book - a science book where the left hand page is blank and the right hand page is lined like normal. The blank page is for gluing in planning, graphic organisers, stretching and chunking words and practising writing a sentence. The book is set out with a learning goal sheet, Essential spelling lists 1-7 and success criteria for writing. I call the group my writing club.

I have struggled to plan for these children as I want them to have some input as to what to write about. So I started my first session with them today. I first showed them their books, asked them what they what to write about. The children came up with ANZAC (as the classroom is full of ANZAC, as it is our topic study), holidays, dolphins, fantasy & futuristic stories, and animals. I have created a list to use and guide the children. I began talking about animals - Pets and I found out that all the children in the group all have a pet of some sort. Mostly cats and dogs as well as a horse.

This has become my starting point as I want to develop the children's ability to describe when writing and it is always good to start with something they're familiar with. As I needed to work with the rest of the class on deconstruction of the new genre, I sent the writing club group away with a fat strip of paper and the expectation they would write one sentence about their pet.

Tonight I wrote out their sentence using Comic Sans font and the children can use this as the starting sentence for the piece of descriptive writing. Tomorrow together we will plan using a main ideas spider graphic organiser, word banks and write what next step they need to focus on during their writing.

Holidays!

I have realised how much I need to "give back" to my husband for all his efforts during this first term. How he just gets things done around the house and copes with my rants about school. Have spent beautiful days just chilling with him and feel so much better. Able to tackle this blogging thing. We have been for a couple of walks and a bike ride around town too.

I know that I need to look after myself so that I can get what I need to do done.