I found out that we are both on the right track with thanks to the National Standards and the levels. The team I was with decided to place the sample of chn's writing that both schools had into groups; below, at and above. This was great because we could compare our school with their school and we actually found out we agreed with these samples.
We began talking about levels and as I am reflecting right now I know (I think I did already) that we (teachers at Vardon) are quite knowledgeable about the levels and what skills each level requires for chn to achieve at each level. We can thank our wonderful PD with Anne Grady last year. It was really drilled into us that you need to have a purpose for writing and it needs to be linked with the term's big idea.
We discussed this and found that we are doing this differently and in my opinion quite well. Our big idea in our team this term is "Strength". We are looking at bridges, our new school logo, Hotumaeua and the history of our Waikato River. We therefore write on topics linked to this big idea. There is then a purpose for writing.
We also discussed writing in pen verses pencil and this is something that my team and I are going to look into. We like the idea of chn writing in pen because they then do not rub continuously out their mistakes and sharpen their pencils!!!
We shared our idea of planning/brainstorming in notebooks. This is going really well in all our middle syn classses. We find that ALL chn are motivated to write and it doesn't matter what level the child is working at they all have a go at writing words, sharing and "hitch-hiking" other ideas. The next step for us is to think about how we can encourage chn to use their plan effectively to write!
Where to from here?
- Liz (from Pukete) would like me to e-mail her ideas from our team on how we provide language experiences for our chn and how we link our big idea
- As a team we discussed mtg with the Yr 2/3 and Yr 4/5 team at Pukete in a couple of weeks. We would live to invite them to our school and discuss our writing levels at a deeper level and what they mean, how we link our big idea to writing and motivating chn to write.
- Trialing using pen instead of pencil
- explore how we can get chn to effectively use their brainstorm/plan to write
It was interesting to see how they used pens at Pukete for writing aye? I thought it was intriguing that they let every student write in black and edit in red. Currently, I only let students in my class use pen when they have proved that they can be neat and tidy in their books. But perhaps thats something we can discuss as a school - maybe we also get our students to write in pen so we can see thier attempts at spelling unknown words etc.
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