Foundation Class 

Fun and Engaging Writing in Prep

When students engage in writing tasks, not only are they learning to be capable young writers, they are also practising many of the important skills needed to become successful readers, giving attention to letter detail, letter order, sound sequences, letter sequences and the links between messages in oral language and messages in print.  

In the Prep classroom we have been making writing authentic, fun and engaging by including shared writing activities, while still continuing with our independent writing.

Our big focus for this term is friendship, fairness and kindness and after lessons about friendship with Harold the Giraffe and our ‘Story of the Week’ called Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley which is a lovely story about the power of friendship, there was a great opportunity to keep the interest going by completing some shared writing. 

We always start our shared writing experience by building the field. Building the field is about tuning the students in. This gives all students in the class the opportunity to interact with the pictures in depth before they begin to write.

I model the sorts of language students should strive to use, and examples at sentence level, using words that the students have brainstormed to describe the setting, characters, what is happening in the pictures and the vocabulary words or phrases that we have learned from the book.

Then the joint construction of the shared writing begins. This has been a game changer in our class because the level of excitement to write in a small group is high. The students work in small groups, jointly coming up with two or more connected sentences. This gives every student the chance to voice their ideas. 

All students must share the pen, meaning they all need to contribute writing in the way that matches their current level of transcription. The students are then asked to share their writing pieces with the class.

The level of confidence and willingness to write has increased due to our shared writing activities and, in turn, the Preps independent writing has shown huge improvements. I am really proud of all their efforts.