Tuesday is writing day - so another lesson using the success criteria the children chose themselves over the last few weeks.
Had two agendas with todays lesson, one to try and get some of the P2's who never write in sentences and run their words together without a finger space in sight to write with spaces and in sentences and the other to work on a 'writer's craft' style task, mainly for the P3's who will be doing their level A writing later in the term.
I started of with the beginning of a story on the board, written with no finger spaces and no sentences or capital letters. First thing the children had 1 minute to discuss with their talking partner what was wrong with it. Almost every child had their hand up at the end of the minute - they are getting the hang of how it works! They easily came up with the reasons it wasn't a good piece of writing. Then we put in all the spaces, full stops, and capital letters for sentences and names, and added these 'good things' to our list of success criteria. 1 more minute to discuss with talking partners what was good about the story (did it follow any of our success criteria from previous weeks?) Again the children were easily able to identify all the 'good' features of the story. (some children when partnered with a primary one seem to be showing a reluctance to use the time to discuss the question - as if they think they just aren't capable. This fortnights random partners haven't been as good as last time!).
All the children were desperate by now to know what happened next in the story...most of P1 and 2 hadn't realised at all that they were going to finish it! But they were all desperate to get on with it as soon as I told them, and were all buzzing with different ideas, obviously brought on through the discussions we had had, although we hadn't directly discussed what would happen next.
I worked directly with P2 this week, and again I was so pleased at the progress they have made. One child in particular, who at the beginning of this term (only 5 weeks ago) was still running all her words together, with shocking spelling and no sentences, suddenly, with the clear guidelines on what is expected of her, (and having helped make those guidelines herself, she understands them all!) is now writing interesting stories, clearly, with good spelling and trying her very best to use her dictionary without help, and beginning to put in full stops and capitals. Today she was correcting herself all the way though ("oops, that should have been a capital"!) - hearing her I couldn't help smiling, she wanted to know what was wrong with me. (So I told her - she might as well know she is making me happy!). Other children are all making similar progress, which I certainly didn't expect in 5 weeks - sharing the learning intentions and success criteria - and in fact giving them ownership of them, really seems to have made such a difference.
P3, whose books I marked later, have shown similar improvements in their writing - it's more imaginative - they are really making an effort to use the success criteria like a check list, and include the features we've discussed. However a couple of them today had had problems with the Writer's craft task - not really continuing the story, but launching off into something completely different, albeit with the same characters. So, next lesson, I will start of by telling a couple of stories which start with one things, and then leave you hanging and start talking about something else, and get the talking partners to discuss what might be good and bad about them. Then maybe use another 'beginning' on the board with a middle and ending which don't quite go with it, to encourage them to notice that it doesn't really work if you don't continue what is there. Depending how that goes, I might have to make arrangements to have just P3 for a writing task one day while the P1's and 2's are doing EI with the CA so that I can reinforce that point to them.
Anyway, all in all a very good lesson again - the amount of improvement shown in 5 weeks has been great, hopefully after half term I will be able to include similar ideas into more of my ES and other lessons, not just writing. (The intention was to use formative assessment strategies in ES as well this term, but, while we've used some ideas, a lot seems to have fallen by the wayside. Maybe I jumped in with both feet too soon....)
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Don Ledingham
Tuesday 07 February 2006