English
Dear Parents and Carers,
Our news this week is all about Writing!
The Writing Revolution
St Anthony's currently uses a program titled the Writing Revolution, which has been a valuable resource for all our teachers when approaching the instruction of writing.
This is an entire program for Writing instruction, but has two very important underlying theories.
- That writing should be taught from the construction of a sentence up. Rather than a focus on different types of text.
- That there should not be a seperate writing curriculum, instead writing should be a core part of every subject taught at school.
Both of these concepts make a lot of sense! We want to be able to build up the skills of our students when writing, irregardless of what kind of writing they are completing. The skills and positive habits when writing should carry across whether a student is writing a narrative story or a quick email to their teacher.
Incorporating writing in other areas of the curriculum also works really well too. For example we know students this term are learning about history, so they can complete this working while still practicing correct grammar and punctuation skills.
Below are a few examples of concepts the Writing Revolution covers in different year levels:
Scrambled sentences:
Students look at these sentences and quickly realise there is something wrong!
Scrambled sentences help students practice not only their capital letters and punctuation, but also the clarity of thought when approaching a sentence. Students reorganise the scrambled words to make coherent sense.
Run on sentences:
These type of sentences are very often seen by our teachers when correcting student work!
An absolute rush of ideas and words on the page, run on sentences are where students describe and describe without taking a breath. Correcting and seeing examples of run on sentences aid our students in understanding how they can better harness their ideas into a more fluent and easy to read writing piece.
Sentence Combining:
These are sentences where students look at combining two or more thoughts into longer more complex sentences. They grow to understand this makes their writing more fluid as well, rather than a series of short sharp sentences.
These work in conjunction with run on sentences, where students practice making distinctions between sentences that are far too long, and sentences which provide nice detail.
These are just a few examples of the strategies used in the Writing Revolution, and as discussed before, these are very complementary of other subject areas.
For example, Year 3/4 Classes completing learning about Australian History might work through some scrambled sentences on Indigenous areas in Australia. Year Six leaders may be writing their scripts to read aloud at assembly, with a focus on sentence combining to effectively pass on their information.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions about what we discuss in the newsletter, or anything at all about our Literacy Programs here at school.
Have a fantastic weekend!
Tim O'Mahoney
English Leader