Every Child Can Write

Teaching for assured success in Years 1 & 2

Overview

In a high performing writing classroom, teachers plan around three critical components of writing success: student attitudes, high quality, clearly intentioned lessons, and teaching for reciprocity across the curriculum. Plentiful opportunities to develop writing skills and knowledge are threaded across the day.

This workshop addresses the three critical components of a high performing writing classroom.

To shape positive attitudes the following ideas will be explored, and practical strategies provided:

• writing tasks should be fun, engaging, and relevant
• every student writes and writes frequently
• self-reliance is fostered … students write alone and unassisted when the adult is unavailable
  • writing stamina … students write for increasingly longer periods of time
• reluctant writers shift from writing because they are told to write to writing because they 'feel valued and successful' …
• students believe they are writers, not people 'simply doing' writing

Quality lessons are informed by observations of writing behaviours, the curriculum and assessment tasks. The most common pedagogies will be explored:

• Teaching pedagogies – the when, why and with whom of selecting a pedagogical approach and crafting clear, narrow learning intentions and success criteria …
• Modelled Writing
  • Why am I modelling instead of jointly constructing?
  • How will this lesson extend the most skilful writer? How is it relevant for the student experiencing most difficulty?
• Joint construction
• Interactive Writing
• Guided Writing
  • In what ways am I differentiating to maximize the frequency and volume of lessons my students need?
  • Why am I facilitating a guided writing as opposed to interactive writing lesson?
  • Which students go together? What size group should I take?
  • How do I track progress and provide daily, descriptive feedback?

Reciprocity is the connecting of reading, writing and oral language skills to deepen cognition and lighten the cognitive load. The following topics will be explored:

• connecting skills from writing to reading and vice versa
• using texts read within English and across the curriculum as a basis for writing skill development and targeted writing lessons
• embedding 'quick writes' or 'demand writes' into other subject areas.

You will receive:

• workshop notes
• tea/coffee on arrival, morning tea and lunch

Cost

$295 + GST (Limited places are available so please register early.)
RSVP: Five (5) working days prior to workshop

Should you attend?

This workshop is suitable for Teachers of years 1 & 2 in mainstream primary classrooms. Attendees are encouraged to bring three students’ writing draft books for applying knowledge throughout the day.

Where and when?

See our workshop calendar for locations, venues and dates. Please note that workshops not identified in your location can be booked directly and hosted at your school.