Enhancing student writing

Our continued commitment to enhancing student writing

“Learning to write is learning to think. You don’t know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.” 

S Hayakawa

This term teachers have continued to explore and implement explicit strategies to support sentence-level writing. We've built on the approaches introduced last year, focusing on reducing sentence fragmentation and improving students' use of conjunctions.

Earlier this term, we welcomed James Pinnuck back to work with our teachers. His sessions helped extend the work we began in 2024, with a focus on supporting students to expand their sentences and improve their notetaking skills.

We're also providing students with more opportunities to write during class time. As part of this, we're trialling targeted feedback on low stakes writing tasks, helping to develop a habit of regular writing and reflection across our classrooms.

Looking ahead to Term 3, students will begin setting their own personal writing goals. This is an exciting step towards fostering ownership of their writing progress and helping them become more confident, capable writers.

To continue the focus of improving students writing, here are two strategies that you can encourage your child to use to improve their writing and learning. 

Strategy 1: One easy strategy is to practice expanding their notes into full sentences

e.g. If they wrote in class while watching a documentary on Stalin:

• Stalin paranoia --> Great Purge (1937-1938) = > 700,000 executed

• target opponents

They would benefit from expanding that to...

During the Great Purge Stalin executed more than 700,000 Russian citizens because he was afraid of political opponents rising up and overthrowing him. 

This helps because they are revisiting content, practising using key vocabulary, combining information in new ways and possibly coming across questions they have about the content that they can ask teachers. 

Strategy 2: Another strategy that you can encourage your child to use is think ink. The idea of brainstorming ideas, key phrases, links between them and then turning that into some great sentences. Your child would likely be able to think of a question or key concept related to the week's content to help them practice their writing and reinforce or extend their thinking.