Focus on Literacy – writing

With a focus on Immersion to gain interest from students, a trip up the gondola to immerse ourselves into observing our surroundings was great. I’m actually quite proud of my drawing, and what a fantastic place for a team meeting.

Writing hasn’t been going that well, trying to teach all 15 children at once with their varying needs and demands. Muireann suggested breaking them in to smaller groups and then giving them rotating writing tasks such as hand writing, spelling, group writing…. anything that helps with the basic skills whilst intensively working with the others. Emma tried this on my CRT day and she said it worked really well, although the sentence I chose for them to piece together was too hard. Must try and make sure it includes lots of high frequency words so the children can succeed with this.

We looked at the writing cycle and applying this to 5 year olds. The biggest reflection has been to ensure there is a purpose for the writing – whether this is writing for our blog http://kimiakau.blogspot.co.nz/ or to publish and share with the family, or Skippers children, or to have on the screen in reception… once the purpose has been established then the motivation to write should be enhanced. This will be really interesting to monitor as the Starwars Concept group has some very reluctant writers with limited ability at the moment. Hopefully, with a clear purpose their writing will improve. Whilst there is plenty more in the cycle – drafting, crafting, and sharing I’m choosing to focus on just picking an audience and with only 4 days of writing left with this group it will be a challenge!