Teach Primary Issue 18.6

www.teachwire.net | 73 Pie Corbett is an education consultant, poet and author known for Talk for Writing . His most recent book is Catalysts: Poems for Writing (talkforwritingshop.com ). Dictate Dictation allows children to be free from the challenge of composition to focus on the more technical aspects of writing: handwriting, punctuation and spelling. Practise the sort of sentences that relate to the text being taught and the sort of errors that the children might make. Include sentence patterns that are new or will help the children take a step forwards. Innovate Model the sentence pattern that you would like the children to work on. Discuss its construction and effect. For instance, in Year 3, you might work on using adverbs to start sentences. Remember to emphasise that punctuation must be accurate. Provide the pattern and then innovate, for example: • Slowly, the tiger moved. • Carefully, the tiger moved. • Desperately, the tiger moved . Join it up Provide pairs of sentences to join, such as The cat hid under the table. and The dog growled. This game can be helpful for getting flow into writing by linking ideas as well as shifting into writing multi-clause sentences. Finish it off Show the class a beginning, middle, end or ‘chunk’ of a sentence, and ask pupils to complete it in their own way. It must be accurate and make sense. When playing these games, get the children to say the whole sentence to their partner before writing it down. OUR TEACHING MODEL 1 Use assessment to identify grammar skills needed in a unit; build them into model texts or extracts. 2 Introduce and explore grammar through oral and written games and activities using model text examples as starting point. 3 Demonstrate how to use grammar features in shared writing and investigate in shared reading. 4 Practise and apply – expect children to use learned grammar features in their own writing, considering accuracy and impact. 5 Use feedback to check accuracy and effect, deciding what to teach next. Begin by showing children the first part of a sentence and discuss ways you could finish it, e.g. The old king... Then move on to the ends of sentences, for example, ... covered with red plants! Finally, and hardest of all, select a chunk from the middle of a sentence, such as ... made up of all the ... Change it around This is a simple game to develop the skill of sentence manipulation. Provide a sentence that has to be altered according to your instruction. For example, give the children a statement such as The old king sat down. and ask them to turn it into a question. Try other instructions, depending on the text type. These could include turning the sentence into a newspaper headline, making it scary, or adding in some description or explanation. You could also challenge pupils to trim back overwriting, or link two ideas together in the sentence. Compare different sentences Present examples of the same sentence written in different ways and discuss what makes them more or less effective, and why. For example: • The man sipped his drink as he stroked the dog. • The teacher sipped his cocoa as he stroked the poodle. • The politician sipped his whisky as he stroked the Rottweiler. Improve it Provide the children with a list of dull sentences to make more interesting. Show or model a ‘boring’ sentence and model how to improve it. Beware of ‘overwriting’ and instances where children just add in lots of words, e.g. The tired, weary, ancient, old man... Tips from the classroom Other aspects that were crucial in this project included ensuring that punctuation was modelled accurately during shared writing, often using colour so the marks stood out. ‘Over the shoulder marking’ and ‘Spot in the margin’ feedback during writing was key to immediate editing by the children. Finally, the evaluation showed that the project was highly successful in schools where the initiative was led by senior leaders with teachers working collaboratively. In these schools, the impact was dramatic. TP T E ACH RE AD I NG & WR I T I NG