Developing Authorship in a Co-teaching Partnership - Part 3

 WHAT?

This year the school has decided to use a vertical structure to move away from silos that happen with - Senior, Middle and Junior school. The names of these Whare Ako are Hinemoa, Ihenga and Kupe. Part of the learning for the children in their Whare Ako is to learn about the respective names and stories that make them special to our school and our local curriculum.

We had been working mostly on building routines and classroom culture for the first term. Also in this Term, we had George from the Rotorua Museum coming to share the story of Kupe and his journeys as an early explorer. Kupe is the chief who is said to be the founder of Aotearoa. After the session with George, the children were able to read the retelling of the story in one of the School Journals and listen to the audio.

To start our writing the children were given a graphic organiser called  a ‘Bare Bones’, this helps the children to order the events and help them to have a place of reference as they write. I had listed the main points into the planner, for the first session of writing the children wrote sentences that helped them plan their story. They were encouraged to use precise word choice and vocabulary that was essential to the story.

The teaching of this writing project was broken down into 4 parts over 2 weeks. We used the whole class teaching to start each day and used the 4 parts but most of the teaching was after we had looked at the books and identified the needs of the children. Some of the strugglers were buddied up and some children were encouraged to come to the workshop. 

The Kupe writing used the whole writing process - planning, writing, rewriting, editing and proofreading. It was the first time for many of the children to use red pen to improve the message of their writing and using a buddy to read aloud to. This enabled the children to work through and write an informative piece of writing that was also entertaining.

SO WHAT?

Being a larger piece of writing than the children had tackled before, it was important that we did it in smaller pieces and that the children could see how paragraphs worked. There was a good ‘buy-in’ from our children, especially those who find writing a struggle. It also helped that the children had been exposed to the story of Kupe a number of times as well. It gave them the knowledge to draw on to help their writing. Having an audio file also helped the strugglers to go back and listen so they could organise their ideas again.

I have no doubt that through this period, the children learnt the story of Kupe and can now retell the story whenever asked. We illustrated the story, enacted the story (parts of it), read the story and wrote our own versions. One child even typed up her story and sent it away to the Toitoi publication to be published. She has been successful as well, pretty impressive for a 7 year old!

NOW WHAT?

I have seen the value of breaking the task into smaller parts so that the children achieve success. Working and looking through the books has enabled us to target specific children so that they get the help they need, be it through buddies or workshops. We need to be mindful of this as we plan.

Using a variety of media to build knowledge helps the children to believe in their ability to write as they know and have the experience, they aren’t pulling the story out of thin air.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

- Aristotle