Creativity and Writing Skills

Finding a Balance in the Primary Classroom

Kay Hiatt, Jonathan Rooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138420298
• eBook ISBN: 9781134136179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teachers, trainees and learning support assistants will find this lively and accessible book combines creativity with skills teaching to stimulate and improve children's writing, both at foundation and primary levels. Based on the concepts and objectives of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS), the content is well founded in experience, research and classroom application.

Special features include advice on planning, linking to NLS objectives, and selecting texts; demonstration scripts for teachers to use in the classroom; annotated extracts from quality literature to help children read as writers; practical advice on strategies to use in guided writing; and examples of children's work that show how to assess the children's writing and set 'next step' targets.

The authors show how you can use drama techniques, story stacks, artifacts and scenarios to engage children in writing, both in fiction and non-fiction, right across the curriculum.

Chapter 1

Getting to the point of writing

At the moment of writing children are struggling to bring together a clutch of different skills, which, when working together harmoniously, will result in a piece of written work. For most children, most of the time, the act of writing is less about an artistic encounter and more about a practical and rather complicated process of construction.

Filling a blank piece of paper with words that say something worthwhile is like working on a construction site. No single builder builds a house. Instead, a combination of architects, bricklayers, surveyors, carpenters, electricians and a host of others bring to the site separate skills they have learned and integrate them. Many skills are brought together in one place, working to a plan for a specific purpose.

Starting with the foundation: young writers at Key Stage 1

Every house needs a firm foundation. Our youngest writers need many opportunities to experiment as writers in order to lay a secure foundation – they need to ‘test the ground’ to find out what works. Frequent opportunities to make meaning for a real purpose, which are watched and encouraged by sympathetic and informed adults, help children to understand what writing is for and become willing and eager to represent meaning on paper even before they can form letters accurately – via pictures and/or ‘mark-making’. They will benefit greatly from watching adults writing in front of them and, quite often, scribing for them so that they get the idea that the spoken word can be written in a graphic form. Every aspect of writing is cemented by one type of mortar: talk.

By the beginning of the Reception Year children should have had many more opportunities to write, leading to a notion of sentences and coherent text structure as they move through Years 1 and 2. These skills of connecting words and sentences are rather like the bricklayer learning to set the bricks correctly in the cement in order to construct the wall – they learn from doing first and develop the finer points, i.e. which brick to choose and which angle to set it at, as they become more skilled up. The finer points of bricklaying are equivalent to word choices, sentence length, punctuation for effect and choosing from a range of connectives to move the text along as a cohesive product – which will hold the construction together. The apprentice bricklayer also needs to watch an expert at work – just as apprentice writers need to see the teacher demonstrating the finer points of writing, in front of them, and see it frequently.

Working towards completion: writers at Key Stage 2

The mind of a junior writer is something like a noisy construction site. Skills of spelling and handwriting work alongside vocabulary choice, sentence construction, paragraphing and organisation of the whole text. Each of these skills can be challenging in itself, and it must be even more daunting to deploy them all at the same time. Internal conversations are going on where decisions about each word and line are being made and adjustments debated and argued over. The quality of the child’s composition depends upon the quality of this internal dialogue about what to use and how everything should be put together.

In this metaphor, then, the teacher is cast in the role of a kind of site foreman, a jack-of-all-trades, guiding the apprentice writers to take short steps to develop each of the skills they need (e.g. sentence construction and spelling) and helping them to see how to make these skills work together so they support and reinforce one another. The teacher both stimulates the imagination and creative impulses and passes on practical techniques.

What works across Key Stages 1 and 2

The setting in the Foundation Stage and the classroom in the literacy hour should become a vibrant ‘writing construction site’ where teachers develop four key approaches to the teaching and learning of writing:

1. Talking: children engage in a lot of talking about writing before writing, during writing and after writing.

2. Stimulating: children have a clear sense of the audience and the purpose of their writing, and have some experiences to draw on so they have something to say.

3. Showing how: teachers explicitly show how to write by writing in front of them and drawing their attention to specific writing techniques and how they can apply them in their own writing.

4. Returning and reviewing: when children can read back a text they have written, children and teachers return to the writing, inspecting it and considering what needs to be done to improve it or to move on to a greater level of dexterity.

The basic principle is that the talk around writing that goes on collectively in the classroom will provide a model for the type of internal dialogue that needs to go on in children’s own minds as they write individually.

Teachers should find their practice enriched by using the ideas described in this chapter and illustrated in the classroom ‘snapshots’ throughout the book. Teachers not using a daily literacy hour will find the approaches and ideas equally useful for helping them to develop and sustain stimulating and structured writing lessons.

The remainder of this chapter outlines three key aspects of teaching writing. Talk for writing is threaded through each of them. These aspects are:

• stimulating their interest;

• showing them how;

• returning and reviewing.

Stimulating their interest

In fiction, poetry and non-fiction writing children need to be interested in what they are writing about if they are going to write well. Children need to have something to say. They need to be stimulated.

Concrete sources for writing: non-fiction text types

• Other curriculum areas. All the other subject areas provide fodder for writing. The Foundation Stage offers many chances to write non-fiction linked to the play area: labels, lists, notices etc. From Year R onwards the learning that takes place is usually assessed through writing of some kind. The texts they need to write in other subject areas must be taught as part of the literacy strategy. A rich source in many primary schools is content from PE and maths lessons, e.g. writing instructions for a new game using balls and hoops, organising and presenting findings using precise mathematical language and vocabulary, such as drawing conclusions from statistics and graphs.

• School visits. A wide variety of visits take place, from supermarkets to the seaside, from museums to battleships. Plan what the focus for writing will be beforehand and show the children how to make simple notes, allow them to take photos, perhaps using a digital camera, feed them with questions and observations that get them thinking and talking about what they see – all this instead of the dreaded worksheet which they have to fill in as evidence of learning.

• Visits from outsiders to the school. Use parents, governors and other teachers in the school who have a wealth of skills and experience to use as a basis for writing – from the long-distance lorry driver to the freelance writer, from the deep sea diver to the trainee teacher. Borrow a member of a history re-enactment group or use the museum service, which often uses actors ‘in role’, e.g. a Victorian head teacher.

• The local area. Focused ‘walk-abouts’ give children real things to write about. In the Foundation Stage this could be a walk to talk about the print they see around them and to photograph it, and to put up a display in school – who is it for and what is the purpose? In Year 6 it may be for a piece of compare and contrast writing based on the local mosque and church.

• Objects and artefacts brought into the school. Objects borrowed from museums and school services, such as a selection of fossils, farming implements, Second World War photographs or an old census, can stimulate different genres of writing.

• Drama. Use hot-seating, children in role, improvised conversations and freeze frames for a key moment in a historical event. All of these give the children another experience, a different way into thinking about what they will write. Use mime for the different stages of a process in science or geography and ask children to write captions for the stages.

Stimulation for poetry

Experience is the key factor in stimulating poetry and fiction writing. Children are more likely to enjoy writing poetry if it is about something they have experienced. More authentic and vigorous writing is likely to emerge if children are asked to craft a poem about something they know well and have experienced with their own senses, e.g. having their hair cut, the playground, getting ready to go to sleep – even sitting SAT examinations! Use the following:

• Artefacts that can be closely observed, touched and smelled, engaging the senses.

• Observational drawings, where details are seen, dwelt on and thought about.

• School visits, which can provide material for poems.

• Other curriculum areas. Work undertaken in other areas of the curriculum can frequently stimulate poetry writing. The work done in a nature area or on light can provide material for poems, e.g. a list poem at Year 1.

• Published poems. Giving pupils time to read a variety of published poems can trigger new poems they would never have thought of writing.

• Drama. Rehearsing for a piece of role play, e.g. Mrs Fox underground in fear for her life (from Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl), can lead to a poem rather than prose at Year 2.

• Guided reading, where children are exploring motives of characters and themes of books, e.g. Blitz by Vince Cross, can lead to poetry on war and evacuation at Year 6.

The key is that children have something to base their poems on.

Writing stories

Most parents are aware of the importance of books in their young children’s lives, and the most familiar genre is the story. (See Appendix 1, Involving parents at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1.) As well as offering enormous pleasure and fun for both parent and child, the reading aloud of books enables children to learn about the features and organisation of language. The way in which parents read books is important too, and they should use their voices to effect, attending to the punctuation to help meaning and express the emotions of the characters. Reading stories aloud and storytelling are crucial throughout Key Stages 1 and 2 – reading and listening leads to telling and writing.

The National Literacy Strategy has built into its objectives the importance of retelling stories and this can be accomplished in innovative ways, e.g. ‘in the round’ as a whole class and in small groups. The teacher can stop the story at any time and scribe for the class the last sentence, using the whole range of print conventions to express meaning, e.g. big bold letters for shouting. Many children at Key Stage 1 may still be unaware of how print can convey the spoken word, through lack of experience of sharing books at home.

Retelling also allows the creation of mind maps of a story, useful scaffolds which children can internalise and use in their own story writing.

Using fairy stories and other well known classes of stories as models for writing gives the children a further kick-start into writing in genre.

At Key Stage 2, writing stories will involve drawing on ideas from, among other things, personal experience, the experiences of friends and relations heard in anecdotes, books read, films and television seen, places visited, feelings experienced and people known.

By bringing in artefacts, telling stories, recalling places we have been and how we have felt at particular times, drawing attention to features of professional authors’ work and using drama and video we can begin to stimulate children’s story writing.

How audience and purpose engage children in the act of writing

Having an audience for writing and knowin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Getting to the point of writing
• 2 Writing at the Foundation Stage for the playgroup, nursery and reception class
• 3 Writing opportunities in Year 1
• 4 Moving on in Year 2
• 5 Sustaining interest in Year 3
• 6 Writing with confidence in Year 4
• 7 Lifting off in writing in Year 5
• 8 Broadening horizons in Year 6
• Appendix 1 Involving parents at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1
• Appendix 2 Writing at the Foundation Stage: using recent QCA guidance for supporting the development of young writers
• Appendix 3 Thirty ways to improve boys’ writing
• Bibliography
• Index