At writing recount I have begun using a prompt using a website called Pobble 360 which uses different images to provide thought provoking ideas and hopefully an increase in language.
As the children are asked the following question: “What can you see in this picture”? A number of higher ability readers are able to read the written text at the bottom of the picture and then call out their answer; which spoils it for the other children (particularly the Priority Learners). So I have asked the children to put up their quiet hands so I can then choose a range of children first to have an opportunity to share their ideas within the group. This has helped with varying degrees of confidence levels as some children are fearful of giving the “wrong” answer and others simply do not have anything to contribute.
In hindsight, using this technique has promoted collaborative thinking/sharing opportunities which involves a snowball effect of learning. For example if one child says: “Dinosaurs” and another child names the dinosaur “Triceratops” this helps and supports other students in the class in addition to the Priority Learners.
All children are encouraged to then write a story independently which includes at least 3 of the following; “who, what, where, when and why”. I noticed how many adjectives the children use when describing what they can see, and observe an increase of overall language since the start of the year until now (nearing the end of Term 3).
Although the grammar or pronounciation may not be correct, their ideas are acknowledged with a positive comment from Mrs Carter to encourage future participation and verbal praise is also given, sometimes with a sticker as a reward for incentives.
The children have continued to add the words starting with “T, U, V, W, X” to our Word Tree. It has been interesting to note that one out of 4 Priority Learners still needs 1:1 support with this as he does not recognise alphabet letter formations.
Photo of Writing samples:
PL: 1
PL: 2
PL 3:
PL 4:
As you can see from the samples above, there is no-one able to complete an independent story about the Dinosaur picture. One child (PL: 3) has started to write backwards. One child (PL:4) does not use finger spaces. One child (PL: 1) has not written sentences and copies “gifted” words straight from the whiteboard. One child (PL 2:) Needed highlighted words as he asked for more support saying he was too tired to write (MORNING SESSION).
Next steps:
- I aim to “test” the Priority Learners on words from the Word Tree at the end of this term to identify which words they have retained and added to their own vocab bank.
- I will also do another Writing recount to see which words are used in their sentence structures.
- The children have been using to nouns (naming words), adjectives (describing words) and in Term 4 will be introduced to verbs (doing words) and ….. to help support them in their story writing.
