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Writing Moderation

An Opportunity for Assessment & Celebration

By Melanie Davis

Assessment plays a key part in planning, teaching and reporting. Teachers are constantly assessing their students using both formal and informal methods, to check their students' understanding and help to meet them at their learning needs. The Victorian Curriculum 2.0 provides the structure and outline of what students are expected to achieve at each level of schooling. Teachers then moderate across Grade levels and the school as a whole to ensure consistent teacher judgement and to support accurate reporting.

Moderation is particularly important in assessing students' writing, as there is such a wide range of skills students need to be proficient in. The writing moderation process provides teachers with clarity for assessment and reporting and is an opportunity to celebrate student achievement. Teachers are able to highlight the strengths of their students and the progress they have made in their writing skills. Sharing across the whole school, also provides the opportunity for staff to celebrate the journey our students go on as writers over their seven years of primary schooling.

Students begin school, with some, limited or no letter and sound knowledge. By the time they are halfway through their first year, most students are producing some simple words and writing letters to match the sounds they can hear. Students are also beginning to write simple sentences.

In the Junior Years, sentence formation continues to be a strong focus, as simple sentences become stronger with adjectives, thoughtful word choices, and inclusions of where and when. They also begin to write compound sentences, focusing on adding or contrasting information.

As students enter Year 3 and 4, they develop their compound and complex sentence skills, as they write sentences with independent and dependent clauses. They also focus on text structure and learn how to build clear paragraphs, allowing them to sequence and organise their writing.

Finally, in Year 5 and 6, complex sentences are looked at for effect, with embedded clauses used to provide more detail. Sentence structure, high level vocabulary choices and the organisation of texts are chosen carefully depending on audience and purpose, while upleveling paragraphs continues to be a strong focus.

These writing samples help to show how our students go from strength to strength in their writing, with the aim of leaving South Melbourne Park Primary School fulfilling our mission of nurturing highly literate life-long learners.

Our teachers hard at work, carefully looking at writing samples.

Have a look at a progression of writing samples below, ranging from our Prep to Year 6 students. These samples have been mainly taken from students' books, and you can see how they have drafted and as they get older, edited and revised their writing to improve it. These are not finished, published versions of their writing, instead a glimpse at the hard work our students are doing every day in their classroom!