Teach Reading and Writing Issue 19

Provide scaffolds such as writing frames to help children organise information. You might also want to suggest a title and provide children with lots of time orally to rehearse what they want to write before they commit it to paper. Children in Year 3 can start exploring more diverse topics – potentially linked to prior learning – and learn to organise and structure their reports with clear headings and subheadings. Again, www.teachwire.net | 63 you may want to scaffold this, perhaps using guided planning and structure strips. Provide practice tasks focusing on grouping information around a theme. Where possible, give children a real-life purpose for their writing, for example, to teach their parents about what they have been learning. Before moving on and adding other features to their non-chronological reports, students in Year 4 can spend time learning how to craft a more comprehensive introduction and conclusion. Provide lots of live modelling and examples of sentence structures for children to choose from, avoiding simple sentences such as, ‘This non-chronological report is about…’. You can also show children how to ensure that they are incorporating technical vocabulary in their writing. The word lists in Appendix 1 of the English national curriculum are a good guide as to what is age-appropriate concerning spellings. In Year 5 , you can use assessment of prior knowledge to move children on. Begin to look at additional organisational features, such as bullet points, numbering, labels and captions. When using these, encourage pupils to make selections based on audience and purpose. Model how to make these decisions so that the information is presented as clearly as possible. By Year 6 , the ideal is for children to be writing non- chronological reports with a high degree of independence, demonstrating all their prior learning accurately. Your school’s individual English curriculum will likely have new grammar and punctuation content that children need to practise, too: colons, semi-colons, conjunctions and so on all have their place in non-chronological reports. Aidan Severs is an education consultant with over 15 years of teaching experience. aidansevers.com @AidanSevers C L AS SROOM AC T I V I T I E S Key features By the time they reach Year 6, pupils should be including all of the following in their non-chronological reports: • Title – this should be clear, engaging, and reflect the subject of the report. • Introduction – a brief overview of the topic, without getting into the details that will feature in the rest of the report. • Paragraphs – the content should be organised based on the different aspects of the subject being presented. • Subheadings – these should be used to signal paragraphs or sections comprising more than one paragraph. This makes it easy for the reader to navigate through different aspects of the subject. • Facts and information – the report should focus on the presentation of factual information and details, not opinions. • Illustrations and visuals – non-chronological reports, such as the ones you see in children’s non-fiction books, usually include images, diagrams, and other visuals related to the content. The purpose of these is to aid the reader in understanding the text. • Presentational features – bullet points, numbering, labels and captions should be used to present information with clarity, and organise information clearly.