For the past six weeks, I have been working with staff in a local primary school to improve the writing outcomes for a small group of Year 1 children. The weekly sessions have given me a lot of food for thought and what follows is a summary of my conclusions.
The importance of keeping things as simple as possible in the early stages of writing development cannot be over-emphasised. At this point, children have so much to think about and, consequently, we need to avoid overloading their working memory with unnecessary information. They have yet to master the skills we take for granted, and we need to give them shed loads of relevant and meaningful opportunities (and patience) to over-practise these skills until they become automatic.
Key areas for early writing development:
Time needs to be spent developing each of these key areas. We are aiming for the day when the children are competently and consistently meeting all of these demands, but this is unlikely to happen overnight! We need to do everything in our power to equip them for competent consistency, whilst freeing up their working memory by:
After the writing activity, the real litmus test is whether the child is able to independently read back what s/he has written.
If you have any of your own thoughts to add, please pass them on!
* Grrrr! If only Weebly would let me change the font for a single storey 'a'!
** When working with young children, I talk about giraffe letters and monkey letters. Giraffe letters have long necks (ascenders), monkey letters have tails which go under the line (descenders).
The importance of keeping things as simple as possible in the early stages of writing development cannot be over-emphasised. At this point, children have so much to think about and, consequently, we need to avoid overloading their working memory with unnecessary information. They have yet to master the skills we take for granted, and we need to give them shed loads of relevant and meaningful opportunities (and patience) to over-practise these skills until they become automatic.
Key areas for early writing development:
- Practise letter formation until letters are consistently starting at the correct point, with the pen/pencil moving in the correct direction (e.g. a*, d, g, o, q all starting from the top of the ‘c’ shape), letters being positioned correctly on the line (clear ascenders/ descenders**).
- Reinforce letter-sound correspondences during handwriting practice by encouraging children to pronounce each sound (as clearly as possible), as they write the corresponding letter/letters.
- Practise segmenting (again, the child needs to pronounce each sound clearly as s/he writes the corresponding letter/letters) and blending (putting the sounds together to say the whole word after writing it). Practise words repeatedly in this way in order to over-learn spellings.
- Aim for each child’s mastery of a steadily increasing bank of known words, which s/he can spell accurately and automatically.
- Encourage children to develop the habit of saying unknown words slowly and clearly so they can identify the sounds and record the corresponding letters in order (some children will need pronunciation modelled for them to scaffold their attempts).
- Enable children to verbally rehearse their sentence compositions several times to help them to secure their ideas before they begin to write (provide an audio-recording device to further support those who need it).
- Ensure children understand the need for spaces between words (i.e. so their readers can clearly see the start and finish of each word).
- Train children to check their written work to ensure their readers can see where each sentence begins (capital letter) and ends (full stop – in the early stages of writing).
Time needs to be spent developing each of these key areas. We are aiming for the day when the children are competently and consistently meeting all of these demands, but this is unlikely to happen overnight! We need to do everything in our power to equip them for competent consistency, whilst freeing up their working memory by:
- Avoiding overly-complicated activities, and keeping tasks as simple and straight-forward as possible (with minimum adult preparation – e.g. reduce time spent photocopying resources/ cutting them out/ sticking them into books).
- Ensuring all staff are crystal clear about agreed learning intentions and success criteria, which are then shared with the children throughout the lesson.
- Modelling a transparent example for the children, specifically linking it to the lesson’s success criteria, to give them guidance and confidence to begin the task.
- Avoiding too much talk (which can often interrupt the child’s own problem-solving attempts). Instead, taking a step back to observe what is happening: how is the child attempting to tackle the difficulty? Offering a prompt to scaffold his/her attempt, whilst also encouraging independence (e.g. jotting down a tricky digraph for the word attempt). Trying not to jump in too quickly, but allowing the child to learn to ‘take the initiative and work at a difficulty’. Each child’s independence is our ultimate goal.
After the writing activity, the real litmus test is whether the child is able to independently read back what s/he has written.
If you have any of your own thoughts to add, please pass them on!
* Grrrr! If only Weebly would let me change the font for a single storey 'a'!
** When working with young children, I talk about giraffe letters and monkey letters. Giraffe letters have long necks (ascenders), monkey letters have tails which go under the line (descenders).