Teaching Writing with Year Four Children

by Ann Foster
(Australia)

I love teaching writing in my learning support role. I took a whole class for planning and editing for a six week block.

The children weren't motivated at the beginning but, as time progressed, more children began to participate fully. The most exciting times for me were the times when the boys read their work. They were the exciting, creative writers. I found that the children who were low achievers were the most creative.

I had only three quarters of an hour each day with this class, so we decided to leave the spelling and the related phonological awareness lessons that I usually start a lesson with to activate the brain!!!

The genre was narrative. Firstly, I collected work from all of the children to give me a base line.

Every lesson began with story telling. I found that the children had lost the art of story telling but I also knew that if we recaptured this lost art, especially with the boys, that our writing would improve. I began telling stories and showing the children how they could use these basic experiences to build a grand piece of writing. I would read a picture book to the children each day and discuss the many ways that the real author began, continued and finished stories. We also developed lists of vocabulary to use in our individual stories.

The children were not allowed to use common names or locations for their stories. We searched the internet and atlases for the names of interesting countries and lists of names of people from these countries. This was fantastic.

We completed some characterisations where the children used description, dialogue and character actions to show the character's personality and character. I was amazed at the differences in skills in the class. Different children showed high levels of skill in isolated areas of writing.

Finally, we edited. We cut out sentences and manipulated them to make them interesting, we used powerful verbs and synonyms.

Here is the beginning of an edited orientation from a boy who failed the Benchmark for Year Three in Australia.

"As the sun filtered through the leaves of the Kakadu Jungle, Oksana and Travis arrived to search for animals in danger of becoming extinct.
The clouds went over the sun and then blackened. It started to rain and the warbling magpies echoed their delight."

This piece still requires work but you would have to agree that it was a great effort.

Writing is exciting and the children love it and develop when we are excited.

Have fun,
Ann Foster