WHAT?
As part of this writing
journey, I have been trying to incorporate more of our ‘topic’ into the stimulus
so that I am not doubling up on what I am doing. So I am making efforts to
deliberately use relatable material for my children.
This is not as easy as it
seems, I have been falling back on search methods such as Journal Surf to find
pieces of writing that will give me what I hope the children will notice during
the analysising stage. I have spent a number of hours looking for the ‘right’
piece.
My last effort was a piece
called ‘Changing Landscapes” a poem by Desna Wallace – this piece discusses the
way that the land is changing due to houses and neighbour hoods being built
and how the willows weep and how the toetoe whisper and how the pukeko loses
out.
For my stimulus I took the
class into our local area which had a neglected wetlands that I hope that
children would like to restore later in the term. We used the iPads to take
photographs and discussed what we ‘noticed’ about the stage of the wetlands. We
looked at the stage of the plants, the plants that should be in a wetlands and
the lack of water as well.
After this I delivered my
lesson using the plan I had written using the stimulus of the poem. I lead the
children to notice the way the author had used personification to create a
picture in the reader’s mind and help us understand better their feelings.
I used the whiteboard to
record the children’s ideas around activating the nouns and what we could
possibly chose to make their writing come alive. Once the children understood
that they could use words like strangling, dying, crying etc, they were more
responsive to the activity.
Then to write – we
co-constructed a success criteria, that I guide the children towards, although
they did suggest the number of sentences that they should be able to write in
the agreed amount of time – 15 minutes.
After writing the children
were encouraged to indicate where they had activated the nouns, precise choice
with their verbs and written 3 sentences. The children were asked to share
their best sentence. I used the ‘ice block’ stick to randomise who would share
their ‘best ‘ sentence.
SO WHAT?
The
children were motivated by the trip to the Wetlands and how it wasn’t as good
as it should be and that they are wanting to make changes to it. The poem also
help them to visual and compare ways to ‘show’ the audience what they meant.
I
was more deliberate in the way I used the language during relating to own life
when we were looking around the wetlands. I also had spoken to Verity in the
morning to see if I was on the right track. She suggested the way to lead the
discussion in the wetlands and how to be deliberate with my word choice to
enable the children to have an extended vocabulary.
When
marking, or looking over the children’s work, I was amazed at the types of
language they were using in their writing and actually how deep their thinking
was. I had a number of boys who were highly engaged and actually wrote well and
could verbalise what they wanted to say.
NOW WHAT?
I
still have questions on how to use the helping circle to get my children to
effectively give good feedback. What steps will I need to develop to ensure
that this become a habit where the children are willingly changing their
writing in response to what is being shared.
I am
taking part in more PD with Verity this afternoon, so hopefully this will give
me the next steps in my journey on creating better writers through 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.
―
Gail Loane
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