BT Literacy Course (Writing - Teacher Inquiry Ideas)

Effective Writing Practice

Teaching Inquiry Inspiration:
Accelerated Learning in Literacy (ALL)

- Jump start for students who are behind (Introducing the writing topic for the week prior to teaching it to the whole class - enables and encourages ALL group to share ideas with the whole class.
- Daily preloading with a core group of students, getting the topics for them and the whole class.
- Modelling book - begin everyday with a cut up sentence (Brain storms of words they might be able to use, sentence starters), students sit together and use the modelling book.

- Introduce the writing topic for the next day
- Weekly focus
-  POBBLE - story starters, writing from other students, new picture everyday.
- Inspiration or influenced by the picture and for them to write about it. 

Criteria for ALL
- 1P writer they needed to make accelerated growth in their learning.
- Looking at students who are just below.
- Open up an Inquiry for what is going to make a difference for those students.

Whole Class
- Knowing your learners and teaching as a whole class, not teaching in groups as 

Teaching sentence structure
- Punctuation is being taught through sentence starters because they know what sort of sentence they should be writing and they know there should be a full stop at the end.
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 Using Rich Literature for Writing.

- Taking from other Authors tool boxes. Identify in reading and use the authors intent in their own writing.
- The power of 3 - Using that rhetorical question
- Notice it, Name it, Identify it - Choose a section of a story with visual language and ask children to draw the
- Give text to children and ask them to highlight all the features the author has used in the text. We don't know why, but we can make assumptions.
- Character study. Use a picture to describe the picture in relation to the text we have read. How can we add or make assumptions in character studies. How do we activate our prior knowledge to make assumptions about stories.
- Show sentences. What do they notice? What do we know by reading just this sentence, what assumptions does this cause us to make? Tell me all the things they notice about that sentence. Noticings cannot be wrong. Use the modeled sentence to make another sentence, identify what we could change in the sentence to change the context.

Power Writing 

Visualization - Giving children one word or a visual (In their head) to then have 1 minute to write about.
- Ask children what they thought about when they were writing (This teaches you a lot about your writers).
- Children learn that all writers/writing is different dependent on the authors experiences.
- Creates critical thinking.

Oral Language

Freeze Frames
- Find a you tube video and make a freeze frame, then together as a class ask them to put the sequence of the whole video together. Pull out the language/vocabulary. (Maybe they call an eagles 'feet' claws or feet, what are they really called?).

Useful Links
Teaching Inquiry: http://success-for-boys.tki.org.nz/Teaching-learning-resources/Story-Starters Pictures, story starter, ideas, examples of student work.
Literacy shed - Writing sheds, so many writing topics using videos etc. Ideas and suggestions for writing including sentence starters.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3qCoCkzjTNcLVpQeExpZnM1MkE/view?ts=5b298bdd