Year 3/4 Bulletin
Writing Focus: Finalising and Editing Our Holiday Recounts
This term in writing, students have been exploring how to write effective recounts based on real-life experiences from their holidays. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building skills step-by-step, planning ideas using the 5Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why), exploring descriptive language and time connectives, and drafting structured paragraphs with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
This week, students reached the final step in the sequence: editing and publishing their own recounts. This lesson was designed to build fluency in revising written work and using feedback and tools to improve the clarity and correctness of their writing.
Fluency
Fluency at Armadale Primary takes place before each session. For writing, students are provided with an area and hone certain skills for 3 - 4 minutes before the session begins. With this fluency, students are exploring synonyms for the above words to help them discover and find more interesting words.
Whole (Modelled)
To support the editing process, the teacher projected a draft paragraph with deliberate errors. Together, the class was introduced to a student-friendly Editing Checklist, focusing on:
- Past tense verbs
- Capital letters and punctuation
- Spelling corrections
The teacher read the paragraph aloud and demonstrated how to apply the checklist one step at a time, for example:
“Let’s check the verbs - ‘goes’ should be ‘went’ because we’re writing in the past.” “Here’s a sentence missing a full stop. Let’s add it to show the sentence is complete.”
Small/Independent Task
Students edited their own recounts using the checklist below. When finalised, some moved onto publishing their pieces with formality. Students returned to their holiday recounts. Using the checklist, they edit their own work independently. They read it out loud quietly to check for flow and clarity. They fix spelling mistakes, make sure they’ve used the correct past tense verbs, time connectives, pronouns, and proper punctuation.
Explicit Small Instruction
With the teacher in small, targeted groups, students are offered targeted learning opportunities in an area they need support in. For this week, students were supported with sentence structure. As seen below, some focused on compound sentences, and some focused on complex sentences.
Year 3/4 Team
Allira.Zeneli@education.vic.gov.au