Writing in the Real World

Our First Visitor

Today was the first of our visits from professionals. We had arranged for guest speakers to come into the Year 6 class to discuss how they use writing in their everyday working lives. The purpose of these talks was to illustrate how writing is a skill that we take beyond school and the classroom. As Martin, Lovat and Purnell (2004) note, ‘purpose is one of the most important ideas underpinning the teaching of literacy' (ibid, p. 9). By using engaging and creative professions we hoped to show the class that jobs that are exciting and interesting also require literate individuals. Furthermore, a study that looked into successful literacy teachers, found that the most effective teachers believed the creation of purpose and meaning to be fundamental within writing (Flynn, 2007).

Today we invited a member of Sussex Police from the Crime Scene Investigation Department. Chris kindly offered to attend on his day off. His job requires him to be able to write detailed scientific reports which are often used in court as evidence. Not only are his reports essential whilst the crime is being investigated but are also important years later if a similar case is being followed up.

The children were captivated by the speaker and were very engaged in asking questions about Chris' job and showed a good knowledge of forensic science! They were easily able to articulate why writing was so crucial to Chris' job role. Motivating the children was essential as this is where children learn best, even more so when they believe that the teacher is interested also (Martin, Lovat and Purnell, 2004).

They partook in identifying footwear images to identify the culprit by matching tread patterns.

Tomorrow the class are writing their own thank you letters to Chris and on Thursday they will be meeting our next visitor, an Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) .

The class teacher and class were very receptive to the visit and incredibly thankful.

Examples of children's thank you letters

Busy Bees!

It's been a busy two weeks!

Last week we visited the school to implement a range of spelling strategies. We made a PowerPoint to illustrate how the class can use different strategies to improve their spelling, this is one of the aims we identified from our original post-it-note survey. Alongside the strategies which we printed off to place in their magpie books, we also implemented a spelling journal.

The spelling journal is a really useful strategy that we learnt about in our Core English lessons. The journal is divided into three sections and highlights that when children make a spelling mistake, they are often only spelling part of the word wrong (the tricky part). For example, in 'necessary' the hard part is how many c's and s's to include. Therefore the strategy asks children to identify the 'tricky part' and try to find a way of remembering it. Perhaps through a mnemonic or a phrase or rhyme, an example for 'necessary' is 'on a shirt you have one collar and two sleeves'.

We have caused C-H-A-N-G-E to happen because the teacher was so impressed by the idea he has agreed to make time each day/week to really utilise this strategy.

We are very pleased with the strategies we have put in place for the class and will be monitoring their success in the near future.