Using documentation to power up writing

One of the challenges of teaching writing is that it can be challenging for children to see improvements day on day.

They often zero in on surface features: spelling, the legibility of their script, punctuation as areas for improvement.

One of the challenges for me as a teacher is to help the children catch that glimpse of progress they’ve made with their writing and development as writers.

This recent unit on narratives the children initially wrote an initial narrative.

I then locked down that piece of writing as an example for the kids to see where they were there with their writing.

Over the course of the unit, it has be challenging for the children to move beyond simple recounts of events to developing their own personal voice on the world around them.

We learned different techniques, we looked at the ‘shape’ of stories that engage. We talked about taking time to plan and think before drafting.We revisited our first piece of writing multiple times over the last few weeks.

How has our writing improved? How do we know its improved? What did we do to improve it?

Today we had another turn at writing our story then used screen shots of our old piece of writing to compare and contrast we were three weeks ago.

It’s amazing seeing children go from ‘I have neat handwriting and I need to work on my spelling’ to 8 minutes of talking about how they’ve developed as a writer.