Monday, May 27, 2019

Using Authorship to promote better writers – Part 4


WHAT?
The children were asked about their Saturday morning as it had been foggy and wet damp. This was done as a prompt for the roll call. The children were asked to reply with a verb.

Before the lesson, the children’s books were laid out in the circle and the exemplars were glued into books. I read the extract to the class and asked what they to notice in the wrting and think about what the author was trying to tell us.

Some children were quick to tell me that the exemplar described a cold morning and that the author had ‘put a picture in the heads’. I asked questions, prompting the children to look how the author had activated the nouns.

There were some confused faces until I asked the children to read through the text once more and see if they could find some nouns, and are there any verbs that activate the nouns. 

After some time I asked the children to follow me as I read and stopped on the nouns. As I did this the children were encouraged to underline the nouns with blue pen and the verbs in red. This gave the children to see the pattern when nouns are asked to do something. This modelling the process of ‘chasing’ the perfect word to say precisely what we mean.

To connect with the children’s life, I introduced all the things they noticed on a cold morning.  I then asked the children to given me a word that shows me what a cold foggy mornig is like. As they gave me the word I created a word bank for the children to use during the writing time. I purposely wrote the verbs in red and the nouns and adjectives in blue.

The next part of lesson required the children to close their eyes and visualise a cold morning, maybe before their football game on Saturday morning. I used questions such as ‘What can you see?’, ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘What were you wearing and why?’ ‘Did you see your breathe as you walked across the grass?’

As a group, the children helped to create a success criteria – activate the nouns, use precise words to say what you mean, use a simile and write 5 sentences. Then the children were encouraged to write referring to the word bank, and write uninterrupted for a period of time before returning to the helping circle.

I directed the children to point to the nouns and how they activated them, I also chose random children to share and I continued the same routine with the other ideas in the success criteria. The children were just getting into the swing of things and the bell rang.


SO WHAT?
The children are needing more time to write. I feel that they are just getting into the writing and I am stopping them although the boys do like the shorter time. I do have some children who are still struggling to record more than one idea in the set time.

When reading Gail Loane’s ‘I’ve got something to say – leading young writers to authorship’ and looking in how helping circles and peer feedback works she says if this set up correctly then the children will do this continually during writing time without teacher intervention.

NOW WHAT?
How can I ensure that my class is giving feed back to each other? I need to make sure that they understand the success criteria and why – clarity in the classroom.

Using Sheena Cameron’s Partner check and 2 stars and a wish, I can scaffold the children’s feedback and how their partner can share what they are trying to achieve in their writing. I hope to observe this in action in another Year3/4 class and get a better picture in my head what this could look like.

This will need  explicit teaching and perseverance on my part to ensure that this works for my class.


In an effective classroom, students should not only know what they are doing, they should also know why and how.
― Harry Wong

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