Writing for my Wizards and Warriors

Hi welcome to 2016. After looking at all the data for my new class I have noticed there is a weakness in writing. So this year, well for the first half of the year, my focus is going to be how I can get my students excited about writing. To do this I am going to have to provide for them visually creative EE's to support them through the process. I have two main groups in my class.

The first group  (The Wizards) are able to write simple sentences using their yellow and blue butterfly cards, with some exciting gifted topic words. But they still need prompting to use the basics, like capital letters and full stops.

My second group of students (The Warriors) are still not using finger spaces between their words and are unable to independently write a simple sentence. These are my priority learners. These students are all reading between level 3 and 8 in PM readers.

So for the last 5 weeks we have been religiously learning the words on the yellow butterfly card. I have made this into a game and it has worked really well. So the next step was to create some EE's using the words off the yellow butterfly card and some high frequency words out of their PM readers, to create very simple sentences. The students have to arrange the words including the full stop on their i-pad and then write them in their book.

The next step was to repeat the process but instead of writing the word that accompanies the picture (dog) the students have to use their letter knowledge and try to sound out what letter the word might start with.  (h for house, c for car, t for train) With these EE's I also added a voice recording using garage band, allowing the students to go back and listen to the instructions again if they needed. Once they had arranged the words on their i-pad to form a complete sentence they wrote them in their book.

The first thing I noticed straight away was the level of independence these students showed they had. I could tell they felt more confident as they were engaged and happily doing their writing because they could. They were not sitting there feeling stink...:) Having to create finger spaces on their i-pads meant they had to write with finger spaces. Two of my students struggled with this at first and they are still struggling but they are writing......yay.

I have a lot of work ahead of me but I am thrilled so far with the results. I am not going to push them and get frantic and worry they are not making progress.........because they are. Right now my main goal is to build up their confidence...it's all about "woohooooo, you wrote amazing sentences all on your own". It's all about scaffolding them in the right way.