Literacy Update
Has this question ever been a part of your thinking,
‘What do the teachers actually do on a Curriculum Day?’.
Proudly, I would like to take up some of your time to share what our day involved on Friday September 8.
Riss Leung, the Oz Lit Teacher, spent the day at St Kilda Park Primary talking to the staff about ‘all things writing’. Previously, Riss has led us through the 6 modules of the traits, building our professional knowledge of what the traits are and why they are important for our young writers.
Last week, Riss talked through the next steps with us, how we best implement that knowledge into our classrooms. Strategies and activities were shared, all through the avenue of strong mentor texts. Texts that we already have in our classroom libraries. Modelling ‘what a good one looks like’ so that the students know what good writing is made up of and providing the students with opportunities to practice how to improve their skills in ways that encourages gentle risk taking. The traits teach students that a good piece of writing includes all 6 traits and that they will benefit from having skills beyond organisation and strong punctuation skills. How sentence fluency provides well built sentences with varied beginnings and sentence types and how word choice can bring a piece to life by applying strong verbs.
Assessing writing first and then building on the gaps rather than assuming what the students need to be taught, was the big message that Riss was teaching us. Ensuring that we are modelling our writing daily to students. Modelling the hard parts of writing, the questioning that we often keep in our heads, the changes we make along the way, showing the students how we talk to ourselves to re-read what we have drafted.
Our day was filled with writing, reading and sharing. Staff were enthusiastic and candid as we understood how the students feel when we ask them to write. We shared, we laughed and most importantly, we grew as educators, empathizing with the complexities involved in helping students write with precision, risk taking and understanding.
Riss continued to remind us that we must focus on ‘progress not perfection’ and that we need to ‘read through the conventions’ to celebrate the ideas the students are bringing to the table, the voice they are using to share their stories and the vibrant word choice they are selecting. We need to celebrate the good and not just highlight the errors.
Showing Riss around our school was particularly rewarding as she was so impressed with the amount of high-quality literature available to every student with the classroom libraries and the mentor texts that each teacher has. Thank you to the entire SKiPPS community for helping us build these amazing classroom libraries through many fundraising events over the past years and to the amazing parents who continue to contact/cover them for us, ensuring that they are a part of our students’ learning for a long time to come.
Please enjoy some student writing below where the Year 1/2 students were learning about verbs and how powerful they can be at changing their writing to be more exciting to read.
By Carlotta 1/2L
By Harrison 1/2L
An informative piece of writing below where the focus was on sentence fluency and using different sentence beginnings to keep the reader engaged.
By Archie 3/4J
Jac Morphy
Literacy Leader