Literacy and Numeracy News

LITERACY - SENTENCE FLUENCY

 This term the staff have been focusing on developing all students sentence fluency. Writing is a complex task, to understand it better and we need to understand how to support our students, in the development of their writing skills.  

Like all skills, writing is one of progression where one skill builds on the next, like we need to learn to walk before we run. The progression of writing skills is:  

1. Students begin by developing their ability to form letters through knowledge of correct entry and exit points for each letter. Combining this with phonological awareness of the letters, their sounds and possible spelling combinations.  This is taught through our phonics program and our use the sound wall.  
2. Students move to constructing sentences and forming and understanding punctuation.  
3. Students progress to developing an awareness of planning their writing with the focus on audience, purpose and structure.  
4. Moving to evaluating and revising their writing, this can be done in a conference with the teacher, small focus groups, the use of self-reflections tools such as rubrics.  
5. Students are then capable of writing a range of compositions for different purposes across different subjects.  

 Fluent writing is graceful, varied, rhythmic - almost musical. It’s easy to read aloud. Sentences are well built. They are varied in structure and length. Strong sentence fluency is marked by logic, creative phrasing, careful construction and word order that makes it feel natural.  

How is this achieved? The 3 main ways students can achieve this in their writing is by focusing on these 3 areas.  

1. Beginning Sentences in different ways  
2. Creating Sentences of different lengths  
3. Reading Sentences aloud to check how they sound.  

Having a regular Family Writing Time can help. Family Writing Time, is a dedicated period of time each day that everyone in the family uses to work on quiet literacy based activities. It is great if you can also model writing during this time, by writing your shopping list, a letter or email to a friend, or birthday cards. While you are writing your child could:  

• Write stories 
• Create comic strips 
• Draw pictures - write sentences that are stories about the picture, write a character profile- describing the character physical and personality features  
• Making a board game with instructions on how to play  
• Write a book review based on a favourite book 
• Using toys to act out a story, write a play for the toys 

The possibilities are endless. The key is to let your child select a literacy activity that they enjoy. That way, they don’t mind working on it for a set time frame. It is recommended that for younger children that dedicated time could be 10 minutes, building up to 20-30 minutes for upper primary students. It is important that at the end of the Family Writing Time, you take turns in sharing your writing or creations.  

Johanne Abbott

 Learning Specialist | 5/6 Teacher