The purpose of a writing study week is to think in depth about what other writers have done in their own pieces of writing and to tease out the things we want to try and emulate in our own compositions (Hayden 2021). Today, I shared my short story (with a setting focus), Trouble At Granny’s, with my class of Year 4 writers and we read it, thought about it and discussed it.

I invited them to identify five mini-lessons which they thought I might have tried out in my story and which they wanted me to teach them more about. And if they could, I asked them to come up with a title for each one. Here’s an example:

They came up with some great ideas and we have begun collating them. These will form the basis of our product goals (success criteria, toolkit, ingredients – whatever you like to call them).

Choosing which stories to study during a genre-study week can be tricky. I always like to include several of my own examples for a number of reasons.

1. Having the writer in the room for the children to probe is a great way to deal with children’s questions about how the text was composed from a position of authentic writerly knowledge.
2. It shows children that you have tried to write the type of text you are asking them to develop themselves.
3. It supports my own development as a writer-teacher as scrutinising my own composition with a class of critics helps me to see potential revisions.

What this session showed me was that rather than going through the motions of identifying the same old features time after time, perhaps children enjoy the challenge of really linking their study of texts to some of the instruction they might want to receive. After all, having an influence over the design of some mini-lessons can be a powerful way to help develop children’s perceptions of themselves as writer-teachers (in their own unique way) (Hayden 2021).

What do I mean by that? Well, two girls in my class have just set up a poetry lunchtime club for other children in the school where they want to pass on their writerly knowledge, strategies and tips. This is a classic example of children being motivated by the type of pedagogical environment in which they are being nurtured. They want to deliver to other children the type of writing instruction they receive from me in class.

There really is no reason why we can’t widen the role children play in influencing our day-to-day teaching decisions. We all benefit when we know more about what our young writers need and respond accordingly (Hayden 2021).

By Tobias Hayden

On the 26h of November 2021, the Education Endowment Foundation published its revised guidance report entitled ‘Improving Literacy In KS2’. It purports to be updated with the latest research and provides guidance for schools to help them deliver evidence-informed literacy provision that improves outcomes for all.

The mission of The Writing For Pleasure Centre is to help all young people become passionate and successful writers. As a think tank for exploring what world-class writing teaching is and could be, a crucial part of our work is analysing emerging guidance reports such as the one provided by the Education Endowment Foundation. It is therefore important that we issue a review of what this document has to say.

What we concluded from our review of the document

The recommendations made in the EEF’s report are timely and generally welcome. However, we at The Writing For Pleasure Centre believe we can provide more detail, guidance and examples for teachers and schools. We urge anyone interested in developing world-class writing teaching to read the cited research at the end of this review before making any changes to their writing teaching or commercial offerings. The EEF’s report supports many of the research recommendations related to the 14 principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2021a). For example, there were recommendations related to the following principles:

• Build a community of writers.
• Read, share, think and talk about writing. 
• Pursue purposeful and authentic writing projects.
• Be reassuringly consistent.
• Teach the writing processes.
• Set writing goals.
• Teach mini-lessons.
• Balance composition and transcription.
• Be a writer-teacher.
• Pupil conference: meet children where they are.
• Connect reading and writing.

We will reflect on these in more detail.

Teach writing composition strategies through modelling and supported practice

To develop pupils’ ability to write… it can be helpful to think of writing as a task made up of five stages: planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Children can be taught, through modelling and scaffolding, strategies which support them to undertake each of these stages of the writing process EEF p.28

(EEF’s Improving Literacy In KS2. p.31)

We are pleased to see the EEF highlight one of the key principles of world-class writing teaching: teach the writing processes. However, as we know, writing is not the linear process the EEF’s illustration might, perhaps inadvertently, suggest. Firstly, it is better to use the term writing processes. This is because there isn’t a single writing process. Each writer’s approach to the process of writing is different and they will use these processes in different ways and in different combinations. We can see that in the different writing habits that are discussed with children in Writing For Pleasure schools:

The writing habits below come from our book Real-World Writers. Writing habits are our own way of doing things. You might be an Adventurer, who likes to draft first then use it as a plan for a second draft. Perhaps you’re a Planner, writing a tight plan to precede your draft.

(Young & Ferguson 2020 p.60)

Many people are Vomiters, quickly drafting from a plan and attending later to revising and editing. Others are Paragraph Pilers, only drafting the next paragraph when they have revised and edited the one before. And there are Sentence Stackers, who perfect a sentence before moving on to the next. I have always identified myself as a dedicated Sentence Stacker, whereas my writing partner is a confirmed Vomiter. It’s totally amazing that we get our writing done together without too much pain. You can have great conversations with children about what kind of a writer they think they are, and they love giving themselves a writerly label and seeing how their friends identify themselves too. 

Of course children can and will chop and change their writing habits depending on the type of writing they are doing or indeed the type of mood they find themselves in on that particular day.

The purpose of this type of lesson is to tell children that they can experiment with different writing habits, and to invite them to try one out in their writing today. Point out that this will help them find their own preferred one in time. Show them examples from your own notebook where you have tried some different ones out, perhaps according to the type of writing you were doing.

The process of producing writing can also be different depending on age and experience. For example the process of writing can look like this in The EYFS:

(Young & Ferguson 2021b)

And like this in KS1:

(Adapted from Young & Ferguson 2021c)

Before looking something like this in KS2:

(Adapted from Young & Ferguson 2020)

When teaching the writing processes is combined with two other key principles, namely: teach daily mini-lessons and be a writer-teacher, we see powerful instruction in our writing classrooms. For example, in our Writing For Pleasure schools, we see teachers explicitly teach and model a single writing strategy or technique before inviting children to use it for themselves during that day’s writing time. This happens every single day.

If we boil down our approach to teaching the craft of writing, it is as simple as:

Teach, then Invite

• Teach. Provide explicit and direct instruction to your class on an aspect of writing you feel they need a better understanding of.
• Invite. Invite children to try it out during that day’s writing time.

For more information on teaching grammar, sentence-level instruction, and other craft knowledge, please see the following mini-books:

• The WfP Centre’s BIG BOOK of writing mini-lessons: Lessons that teach powerful craft knowledge for 3-11 year olds [LINK]
• The WfP Centre’s grammar mini-lessons for 5-11 year olds [LINK]
• The WfP Centre’s sentence-level instruction for 3-11 year olds [LINK]

Setting process goals

Ms Howarth may want to consider how to make… writing less daunting for her class. This could be done by initially focusing on one element of the writing process in each session, for example, planning or drafting, with shorter, regular sessions over which the children can complete their [writing project]. Breaking a [project] down in this way and teaching pupils strategies for approaching each stage of the writing [project] will also allow children to have time to reflect on and understand the writing process[es]. EEF p.28

Here we can see another principle of world-class writing teaching being suggested by the EEF: the setting of a process goal (also known as a writing deadline), the thing children need to get done in that particular writing session. Here are some examples of what process goals can sound like in Writing For Pleasure classrooms:

• Today, our goal is to fill out our planning grids. 
• Today, our process goal is to let the last few people finish their planning grids.
• Today, our goal is to write our second section.
• Today, our goal is to write about your third topic.
• Today, our process goal is to write our endings. 
• Today, our process goal is to write our introductions.
• Today, our goal is to write one of our sections.
• Today, our process goal is to write our conclusion.
• Today, our goal is to think about our character description.
• Today, our goal is to try out writing some suspense into our pieces. 
• Today, our process goal is to finish our drafts if we can.
• Today, our goal is for the last few children to finish their drafts.
• Today our goal is to check our writing against our revision checklist.
• Today, our process goal is for the last few children to finish revising their pieces.
• Today, our process goal is to check for capitalisation. 
• Today, our goal is to check for our use of vocabulary.
• Today, our process goal is to check our punctuation.
• Today, our goal is to check our spellings. 
• Today, our goal is for the last few children to have time to check their spellings.

Obviously, once children have a secure understanding of the writing processes and the strategies they can use to negotiate their way through these processes, teachers can begin to set more open-ended writing deadlines (process goals). For example:

• Today is our first writing day. You have 14 writing sessions in total. Use your time wisely!
• What do you want to get done today? Make sure you’ve set yourself a process goal.
• What do you want to get done today? Remember, we’ve got 8 more writing sessions left before our publication deadline.
• Can I check where everyone is at? Who is drafting? Who is revising? Who is proof-reading? Who has handed in their manuscript?
• We’ve only got a few more days left before our publishing deadline. You need to make sure your manuscripts are nearly ready.
• We’ve got a couple of days left. You need to make sure you’re proof-reading now. These manuscripts need to be ‘reader ready’. 
• This is our last day. I need all your final manuscripts in. They must be full proof-read. If they’re not, you better work with some friends to get them sorted. 
• OK, I can see that despite our best efforts, loads of us aren’t quite ready yet. I’m therefore going to extend our final deadline by a few days. This is to give you all the very best chance of producing your best pieces. For those who are finished, please enjoy a few more days of personal project time.

Whilst many teachers appreciate how this kind of instruction can help children navigate their way through a writing project successfully, many rightly bemoan the fact that children will finish what they are required to do at different times. That’s why we highly recommend that, once children have finished what they’ve been requested to do as part of the class writing project for that day, they know they can continue working on their personal writing projects (Young & Ferguson 2020). This ensures that all children are engaging in meaningful and productive writing practice throughout the whole writing session, what we call being in a ‘constant state of composition’ (Young & Ferguson 2021a). For more information on how to set up personal writing projects in your classroom, please see our dedicated mini-book on the subject.

What happened to generating ideas as its own distinct writing process?

One aspect of the EEF’s guidance that was disappointing was to see that the most important writing process fails to receive the attention it deserves: generating ideas. Idea generation is a process which happens before writers begin planning, and indeed is a process which informs how one decides to plan. Too often we see teachers or scheme writers taking cognitive and emotional responsibility for this part of the writing process and as a result children fail to receive a complete writerly apprenticeship (Young & Ferguson 2021a).

Teachers or scheme writers who formulate writing ideas on children’s behalf are making a serious instructional mistake (Young & Ferguson 2021a). One of the problems is that children don’t have equal access to writing topics. For example, when teachers or scheme writers choose topics for writing derived from their own personal interests and cultures, they are only ever helping children who are most ‘like them’. Writing on a topic chosen by someone else also makes the task of writing more cognitively difficult (Stein 1983; Heller 1999). In contrast, when children are allowed to choose and access a topic they are familiar with and emotionally connected to, their writing performance improves and they produce higher quality texts (Bruning & Horn 2000; Kellogg 2001, 2008; Graham 2006; Purcell-Gates et al. 2007; Flint & Fisher 2014; Behizadeh 2014, 2018; Fletcher 2016; Young 2019; Harmey 2020).
If teachers are interested in teaching their students strategies and techniques for generating their own ideas within the parameters of a variety of written genres, consider looking at our BIG Book Of Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds which includes over 70 such techniques.

Let’s have an ideas party

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas – Linus Pauling

Generating ideas is one of my favourite things about teaching young writers. Children have a wonderful ability to come up with unique and original ideas in a way that I can’t. When you gather children onto the carpet with some flipchart paper next to you, write ‘things we can write about’ at the top and then invite them to come up with ideas for the class writing project, it’s like a creative bomb goes off. This is especially true with children who have had a long apprenticeship with the principles of a contemporary writing workshop approach (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a). The best thing about generating ideas in a social way with others is that often other people’s ideas spark your own ideas off too. You can pin these lists up around the room so children can refer to them over many days if they want to. With the youngest of children, you may want to draw diagrams of the things they suggest, as opposed to writing it down.

Here we see the Nursery children in Marcela Vasques’ class being invited to have an Ideas Party.

An example of what an Ideas Party can look like in KS1

An example of what an Ideas Party can look like in KS2. Here the teacher asked the children to come up with a variety of short story ideas for each of the themes in the middle of the paper. The children worked together to ensure they had ideas evenly spread across the different themes by keeping a tally chart. After around twenty minutes, the class had generated around 200+ story ideas. 

Taken from Young and colleagues (2021)

Teach writing composition strategies through modelling and supported practice: Balance composition and transcription

It is important to promote the basic skills of writing (handwriting, typing, spelling and sentence construction) — skills that need to become increasingly automatic so that pupils can concentrate on writing composition. EEF p.30

This is good advice. However, you rarely hear these two components of advice being reversed. For example, if we teach children (through repeated, daily, meaningful practice) about composition, they have more cognitive energy to focus on skills like transcription. Indeed a daily, meaningful and sustained period in which to write is one of the best ways of ensuring automaticity of not only transcriptional skill but also compositional competence (Dahl & Freppon 1995; Hall 2019; Roitsch et al. 2021; Young & Ferguson 2021a).

Developing handwriting accuracy and fluency

It’s well known that early writers should focus their efforts on ‘automaticity’ and fluency of handwriting rather than on the adherence to any particular style (Graham et al. 2012; Santangelo & Graham 2016). The main aim at this age is for children to write quickly, accurately and effortlessly. The fact is children who write with automaticity go on to perform very well in their later years and produce higher-quality pieces (Puranik & AlOtaiba 2012; Malpique et al. 2017, 2020). We are therefore pleased to see the EEF’s guidance supporting this position.

Developing compositional fluency

Although accurate spelling, grammar, and handwriting are important, at this stage [planning, drafting] they are not the main focus. EEF p.33

Many Writing For Pleasure classrooms will help children to focus on their composition whilst drafting and will also support children’s writing fluency by giving them the drafting advice below. Getting children to draft quickly, fluently and happily is essential to their writing success. It’s while drafting that children discover, perhaps for the first time, what it is exactly they want to say. This is no easy task and we can often make this process even harder by inundating children with additional burdens. While meaning well, we are directing children to focus on the wrong things at the wrong time. Children simply must be allowed to draft freely. They can attend to additional demands like success criteria when they are revising and transcriptional accuracy when they are proof-reading.

Drafting advice

(Taken from Real-World Writers Young & Ferguson 2020)

It’s a good idea to give this drafting advice at the beginning of the year. It’s also useful to share it across a whole school, and a poster on the working wall is helpful. For this lesson, it’s good to show children a piece of your own writing where you’ve applied the advice. Let them ask you questions about your writing process too. Over time, you’ll find children beginning to develop their own idiosyncratic ways of drafting.

Developing children’s ability to attend to and correct their spellings

Writing ‘Sp’ beside spellings pupils are unsure about and then checking spellings using a dictionary. EEF p.30

Our Writing For Pleasure schools take proof-reading extremely seriously. The expectation is that children are to prepare their manuscripts for genuine publication beyond just teacher evaluation. As a result, they are explicitly taught how to proof-read and are given multiple sessions to get their manuscripts ‘reader ready’ prior to publication (Young & Ferguson 2020). Part of proof-reading is obviously attending to your spellings.

Children are taught to circle any ‘temporary spellings’ (also known as unsure spellings, invented spellings or ‘sound spellings’) when drafting (Young et al. 2021). This reminds them to look up the conventional spelling when it comes time to proof-read. However, dictionaries are probably one of the worst places to go if you are trying to look up a spelling you don’t know, since their main function is to supply definitions for words. Instead, we recommend children use:

• Word walls (a list of common words children should know how to spell are up on the wall).
• Common word lists (x10, x100, x1000).
• Their friends.
• The book they are reading.
• Electronic devices (such as computers or tablets) which include speech facilities like Siri or Google.
• Electronic spell checkers.
• Phonic dictionaries like ACE.

Teach writing composition strategies through modelling and supported practice: Set writing goals

[Use] checklists to support…writing and monitor progress towards goals. Over time, pupils can be prompted to develop their own checklists before starting to write, instead of using checklists provided by their teacher. It is important that pupils learn to modify their writing according to the audience for whom they are writing, which includes selecting an appropriate form or genre. Pupils need to learn the features and conventions of different genres. Exposure to a rich range of genres and identification of key features can support this. EEF p.30-31

It’s really great to see ‘setting goals’ and ‘genre study’ being mentioned in the report. However, this could do with a little more unpacking. Firstly, we know that goal setting can be one of the most effective practices for teachers to employ in their writing classrooms (Young & Ferguson 2021a). Goal setting includes:

• Establishing a publishing goal for a class writing project. Who is going to receive the writing at the project’s end (beyond teacher evaluation).  
• Product goals. These are things you might need to do or include to write ‘the best piece in the whole entire world’. 
• Process goals. These are process deadlines: things you need to get done on the road to final publication or performance.

Here we can see the variety of mentor texts which have been discussed and studied as part of an information text class writing project. The class have studied other children’s successful texts from previous years, commercially published texts which match the kind of writing the children are expected to make, and their teacher’s own exemplar text.

Genre-study is a significantly effective teaching practice (Graham and Perin 2007; Purcell-Gates et al. 2007; Rose 2008; Graham et al. 2012 Olinghouse et al. 2015; Koster et al. 2015; Young & Ferguson 2021a). Writers learn about writing by studying the texts of their heroes. These can be called mentor texts. If I asked you to write a film review and you’d never written one before, I suspect your first thought would be to read a few. The same is true in our writing classrooms. We want teachers and children to study the kind of writing they are about to embark on in their class writing project. These texts need to match the kind of writing you’re expecting children to make themselves. If children are writing short information texts, read short information texts. If you’re writing poetry, read poetry. As you’re discussing and studying these mentor texts, you need to make a list of ‘product goals’ (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2021g). These are the things you’re going to try and do to write ‘the best texts in the whole entire world ever…’

For example:

Here we can see a list of product goals children and their teacher have identified whilst discussing and studying a variety of fairytale mentor texts. These will inform the teacher’s future writing lessons.

Teach writing composition strategies through modelling and supported practice: Pursue purposeful and authentic writing projects

It’s great to see the EEF acknowledge that writing is a cognitively demanding activity which requires children to engage in daily practice which is meaningful, motivating and engaging; writing that is orientated towards writing for purpose and genuine audiences. ‘Consideration of purpose and audience can support effective writing. Like adults, children may benefit from having a reason to write and someone to write for’ (p.31).

Being moved to write
The EEF suggests that there are four purposes for writing: to describe, to narrate, to inform and to persuade. Readers might find it interesting to know that our curriculum and resources are developed around the idea that there are six common reasons we are moved to write. These include:

One way to get the children to reflect on their own writing and ideas is to ask them to think about: Why do writers write? They can then also reflect on why they write, what they like writing about and the purpose behind their writing and other writers’ writing. You can create a poster for your class or the children can create and generate ideas in their books. When I taught this lesson, it was good to have the display that the children had created because we kept referring to it, during conferencing and other writing lessons. They knew and could readily tell me why they were writing, with a definite increase in confidence and motivation.

We want writing in classrooms to match (as closely as possible) the reasons people are moved to write out in the world. This is what purposeful and authentic writing is all about. Class writing projects should therefore be written for an audience beyond just teacher evaluation. Children’s writing should find its way into people’s hands, into their ears and across their screens. We make this recommendation not only for its affective and motivational benefits but also because it helps children write higher-quality texts (Boscolo & Gelati 2019; Bruning & Horn 2000; Gadd & Parr 2016; Hickey 2003; Young & Ferguson 2021a). However, teachers can often struggle to plan authentic writing projects. This is why we provide a host of example projects on our website for teachers to download and use. Teachers could also consider how they can adapt their existing projects to make them more authentic. For example:

Less authentic	could become	More authentic
Writing x30 pseudo-authentic letters to a collection of chairs which have left the classroom, asking them to return Or Writing x30 pseudo-authentic letters as an evacuee in World War 2	could become	Writing a letter to someone you admire. [LINK]Writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper about an issue of concern. [LINK]Writing a letter to someone in the family or community with a little power or influence, making a request for change. [LINK]
Writing x30 pseudo-authentic  newspaper articles about the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb Or Write x30 pseudo reports about a spaceship landing in the playground	could become	Writing a class newspaper full of different articles, opinion pieces and features.Writing advocacy journalism articles about local charities. [LINK]
Writing x30 pseudo diary entries as the Iron Man	could become	Writing a personal memoir to share with family and friends. [LINK]
Writing x30 copies of pseudo instructions for a robot to make a jam sandwich	could become	Writing some instructions on how to do something you’re really good at so you can teach others. [LINK]
Writing x30 copies of Queen Victoria’s biography	could become	Writing x30 different biographies of people in your families or the local community. [LINK]
Each child turning a video they’ve watched into a playscript they never get to perform	could become	x30 short sketches which could be swapped with other classes. Children could then be invited to perform them for one another.
Writing x30 copies of the same story idea for teacher evaluation	could become	Writing x30 different stories as an anthology to go in the waiting room of the local doctor’s surgery. [LINK]Writing x30 different picture books for the class libraries in KS1. [LINK]
Writing x30 pseudo information texts about a made-up animal	could become	x30 different information texts on something they are knowledgeable and passionate about. These information texts could be put together to create a class encyclopaedia of knowledge. [LINK]
Writing x30 reports of the same science experiment	could become	Writing a variety of reports in response to different scientific inquiries and questions children wanted to find an answer to. [LINK]

Alternatively, a class (teacher and pupils together) can identify a genuine purpose and audience for any class writing project themselves by using our Publishing And Performance Menu.

Choose something delicious from the publishing menu

Publishing is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message – Margaret Atwood

At the beginning of a new class writing project, I always give out what I call my ‘publishing menu’. It’s a place where children can see all the different options for where our writing could go when we publish at the end of the project. We talk about the menu options. We discuss their pros and cons. This kind of discussion inevitably leads to us talking about the possible audience for our writing too. 

By the end of this lesson, we will have chosen from the menu where our writing will end up. This publishing menu can be found in any of our class writing project resources. However, I can highly recommend making your own – and ask your class what they think could go on the menu too. Children have great ideas about where their writing can end up.

Finally, the EEF rightly points out that ‘combining reading and writing instruction can support children’s development in both’ (p.31). However, we need to be careful. This is what we currently know, from educational research and from case-studies of exceptional writing teachers, about the interconnections between writing and reading in the classroom:

• When young writers read, ideas for writing occur.
• Children learn much about the craft of writing and develop an ‘inner ear’ for language if they are given regular, sustained and wide opportunities to read. 
• Children who read and listen to high-quality texts include more literary features and write better texts.
• Children who read poetry include more imagery and other poetic devices in their own writing. 
• Young writers often develop strong affective bonds with the things they have read and use aspects of these texts in their own writing.
• Children who write in response to the texts they have read significantly enhance their comprehension of those texts.
• Children having ample time to read is fundamental to their writing development. 

(Young & Ferguson 2021a)

We argue that learning to be a writer is one of the best ways children learn to read. However, we also encourage teachers and commercial providers to reflect on the limitations a literature-based approach can have on children’s writing development.

Developing children’s language capabilities: Pupil-conferencing

Pupil-conferencing is one of the principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2021a). We therefore welcome the EEF’s recommendation that schools ‘design a school feedback policy that prioritises and exemplifies the principles of effective feedback’ (p.34). This is because it gives pupils and teachers an opportunity to engage in quality talk. We see aspects of good pupil-conferencing shared in the EEF’s report too. For example:

Teachers can increase the quantity and quality of classroom talk by: – asking open questions, such as questions that require pupils to explain, reason, or argue; – probing with follow-up questions that require pupils to expand on their answers; – building on pupils’ responses to move the dialogue forward; – encouraging pupils to ask their own questions; – ensuring every pupil has opportunities to articulate their ideas and be listened to. EEF p.13

For more information on assessment-based responsive teaching, please see our Writing Development Scales & Assessment Framework and Pupil-Conferencing Mini-Book. 

Developing children’s language capabilities: Read, share, think and talk about writing

We know that writing and being a writer is a personal and intensely social undertaking which is both cognitive and emotive. One of the principles of world-class writing teaching is to ensure that children read, share, think and talk about their writing. We ensure that children learn that they can articulate and develop their ideas with their peers prior to writing them down. 

You can read about how Writing For Pleasure teachers have created a classroom culture that encourages dialogue by reading the examples of practice below:

• You can read about how Benjamin Harris incorporates opportunities for dialogue into daily writing sessions through the Author’s Chair [LINK].
• You can read and listen to how writer-teacher Sadie Phillips taught her children to peer-conference [LINK].
• You can read about how Tobias Hayden talks with his class about what writing instruction they feel they need most [LINK].
• You can also read our article about how to develop children’s talk for writing [LINK].

Developing children’s language capabilities: Expanding pupils’ vocabulary

Explicitly teaching and modelling strategies writers use to consider their word choices is an important part of receiving a well-rounded writerly apprenticeship. There are a number of mini-lesson designed to help establish good habits when it comes to considering vocabulary in the Word Choices section of our BIG book of mini-lessons. For example:

‘Cracking open’ boring words

We all do it. In our excitement to get our thoughts down, we will write the words that come to mind immediately. This is fine and is a good way of drafting fluently. However, it is always worth revising your draft afterwards to notice just how often you may be using the same words. Sometimes I use my Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words & Phrases to help me, but online thesauruses are excellent too. Otherwise, I will ‘crack open’ the word by drawing a circle around it and writing alternatives.

The best thing to do with this lesson is to show children how you have used this technique yourself in your writer’s notebook. You can explain how you went about it and answer any of the children’s questions. You can then invite your young writers to have a go for themselves in their own writing that day. This lesson is most effective when the majority of your class are revising their pieces.
Taken from Young et al. 2021

Teaching spelling and recognising types of spelling error

We recognise the EEF’s frustrations at the lack of high quality evidence about how to teach spelling, but agree that the evidence we do have points towards spelling being actively taught rather than simply tested (Adoniou 2014; Alves et al. 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022).

Harold Rosen once famously said to Donald Graves that any idiot can tell a genius they’ve made a spelling mistake (Graves 1983 p.188). We are sure there are many who have experienced ridicule or been made to feel unintelligent simply because they were unable to spell conventionally. Unfortunately, these negative views still persist in society and have serious long-term consequences for an individual’s confidence and desire to write.

Ways in which teachers can improve children’s spelling include:

• Prolific opportunities to write.
• Prolific opportunities and time to read.
• Explicit instruction in how to proof-read.
• Explicit spelling instruction. It is suggested that children be exposed to a balanced approach to instruction which includes teaching phonology, morphology, orthography and etymology in combination and at the earliest of stages.

Taken from Young & Ferguson 2021a (p.181)

Sentence construction

At The Writing For Pleasure Centre we’ve recognised the need to take sentence-level instruction seriously and to teach children about sentences in a way that helps them write what they mean. We know that formal grammar instruction has always had a negative impact on children’s writing development (Kolln 1996; Fearn & Farnan 1998; Andrews et al. 2006; Weaver et al. 2006; Wyse & Torgerson 2017; Hudson 2017; Myhill 2018; Young & Ferguson 2021). However, like the EEF, the types of sentence-combining instruction suggested within the pages of our Sentence-Level Instruction Mini-Book are far more promising (Keen 2004; Graham & Perin 2007; Limpo & Alves 2013; Saddler 2019; Walter et al. 2021; Young & Ferguson 2020). We believe work around sentences should be in the service of developing children’s style as writers. We describe sentence-level instruction, and by extension instruction on style, as being about helping children:

• Share their writing voice and identity.
• Achieve the purpose they have for their writing. 
• Write with clarity and simplicity.
• Develop, elaborate on and embellish their initial ideas.

Our mini-book breaks this instruction down into three categories:

• Focused sentences
• Balanced sentences
• Developed sentences

Target teaching and support by accurately assessing pupil needs

Formative assessment can be integrated into classroom teaching strategies to help ensure that pupil needs are identified and teaching is appropriately targeted. Formative assessment involves eliciting evidence of learning from pupils on an ongoing basis and adapting teaching to meet pupils’ needs. EEF p.39

The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Writing Development Scales And Assessment Toolkit is written predominantly to support our affiliate schools who pursue the principles of Writing For Pleasure. Assessment is at its most powerful, and most useful, when it is aligned to a school’s curriculum and what teachers and students are doing in class every single day. However, we believe any school can use this material if they appreciate the need for children to:

1. Receive direct and explicit instruction in the craft of writing every day (Young et al. 2021; Young & Ferguson 2021d; Young & Ferguson 2021e).
2. Be given an opportunity to write meaningfully and for a sustained period every day (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2022).
3. Receive additional responsive teaching through daily pupil conferencing (Ferguson & Young 2021).
4. Develop their artistry, narrative, opinion and non-fiction writing over time (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2022).

We also need to look at the principles of assessment. For example, our toolkit is as much about assessment-based responsive instruction as it is about assessment itself. Assessment isn’t about data. Data has never helped a child write better. Assessment is about obtaining valuable information to make your teaching more effective and efficient. Assessment-based instruction is about:

• Children finding out what makes a piece of writing successful and meaningful.
• Children being involved in setting writing goals for class projects.
• Teachers providing daily writing lessons that are responsive to what their class needs instruction in most (Young et al. 2021; Young & Ferguson 2021d; Young & Ferguson 2021e).
• Teachers providing individualised feedback, through pupil-conferencing, that is responsive to what their pupils need instruction in most (Ferguson & Young 2021).
• Children crafting their writing because they have an emotional investment in it being the best it can be (Young & Ferguson 2021a).

What next?

Is there a moral purpose to teaching writing? At The Writing For Pleasure Centre, we believe children should know how to successfully live a writer’s life after leaving school. We want them to write well for educational purposes (to pass exams and to share what they know with skill and precision).  We also hope they would know how to live the writer’s life for economic reasons (the ability to write with authority, daring and originality is great currency). We hope they could live the writer’s life for political or civic reasons – sharing their knowledge and opinions with clarity and imagination. We also hope they would write for personal reasons – as an act of reflection or recording. Finally, we would want them to know how to write for reasons of pure pleasure and recreation – feeling a sense of joy and accomplishment in sharing their artistry, identity and knowledge with others in ways that are profound and confident.

The thing that’s disappointing about the EEF’s guidance report is its lack of a clear vision of what writing is and what being a writer should mean. As we have said, writing and being a writer is personal and intensely social, and is both a cognitive and emotive undertaking (Young & Ferguson 2021a). However, the EEF’s report draws heavily on a theoretical framework which fails to fully appreciate this. The model used to influence the report was originally called The Simple View Of Writing. This view of writing is now outdated and has required repeated revisions in recent years. Academics have recently noted how The Simple View Of Writing leaves out major aspects of how children develop as writers.

The simple view originally suggested that writing is made up of only two components: ideation and transcription (Juel, Griffith, & Gough 1986; Berninger et al. 2003) and later a third component of ‘executive function’ was added in 2006 (Beringer & Winn 2006). One problem with this framework is that it treats writing as a simple marriage between transcription and ideation, when really it involves numerous highly interconnected components. Another issue is that interpretations of this theoretical framework regularly result in flawed pedagogical recommendations being suggested and adopted by policy-makers, commercial providers and teachers, namely in the form of a ‘presentational skills’ orientation towards writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2021a). Thankfully, we don’t believe this is the case with the EEF’s report. Finally, despite The Simple View Of Writing influencing policy and practice for many decades, we still see profound underachievement in writing across England where it has been highly influential. This underachievement is rightly recognised as a major issue in Professor Francis’ forward to the EEF’s report.
As we’ve said, the Simple View Of Writing cited in the EEF’s report has since been revised and its limitations highlighted. Below, we provide references to the latest thinking around The Simple View Of Writing for people’s interest. However, whilst these revisions are making the framework better all the time, they are, in our view, still limiting and incomplete.

• Kim, Y., Schatschneider, C. (2017) Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing (DIEW) Journal of Educational Psychology 109(1) 35-50 
• Kim, Y,. & Park, S. (2019) Unpacking pathways using the direct and indirect effects model of writing (DIEW) and the contributions of higher order cognitive skills to writing Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 32, pp.1319–1343

This isn’t just a problem for the EEF. The Writing For Pleasure Centre is also in the process of trying to devise an alternative conceptual framework which can better encapsulate what it means to develop children’s writing and themselves as writers. There is no doubt teachers and commercial providers need an alternative framework which can fully acknowledge the complex social, cognitive and emotive nature of writing and being a writer, alongside pedagogical and instructional recommendations that centre around helping children write the most accomplished texts that they can. Our early work suggests a need for us to move towards a ‘whole-child’ approach. Please note that our use of the phrase ‘whole-child’ shouldn’t be confused with a child-centered or naturalistic approach to writing teaching. As we’ve already discussed in previous writing, this would not be our recommendation (Young & Ferguson 2021a).

A whole-child approach to teaching writing and developing writers. Adapted from Young & Ferguson (2021a)

Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson

References

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• Hall, A., (2019) Every Child is a Writer: Understanding the Importance of Writing in Early Childhood Institute for Child Success [Online: https://www.instituteforchildsuccess.org/publication/every-child-is-a-writer-understanding-the-importance-of-writing-in-early-childhood-writing/%5D%5D
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• Koster, M.,Tribushinina, E., De Jong, P.F., and Van de Bergh, B. (2015).Teaching children to write: A meta-analysis of writing intervention research. Journal of Writing Research, 7(2), 249–274.
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• Olinghouse, N., Graham, S., and Gillespie, A. (2015). The relationship of discourse and topic knowledge to fifth graders’ writing performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(2), 391–406.
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• Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021d) Grammar Mini-Lessons For 5-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
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This mini-lesson (A spectrum of gifts) was taught as part of our persuasive letter project.

I invited children to consider things they would like to persuade someone to gift them (a thing, their time or an experience). Careful consideration was given to costs with our focus being on things that are ‘freebies’ as opposed to expensive unattainable items. The design of the lesson was interesting and emerged through a whole class discussion. Children had indicated that they favoured a mini-lesson in this area so we invented it together! I think it worked well, and really forced them to consider the nature of the potential requests they were making.

At the end of the session, I taught the children a technique for helping them to choose the one final idea they wished to take forward called, Let’s rank! We discussed the criteria we wanted to use to simply evaluate each idea and came up with desire (how much we really wanted the change, experience or gift we listed) and likelihood (how likely we were to have our request granted). Pupils collated their favourite ideas from across the two Generating Ideas mini-lessons (Make a change! and Spectrum of a gift) into ‘A top-five list‘. Having done that, we assigned a number of hearts for desire and a number of ticks for likelihood (a maximum of three for each) to help establish which idea should be taken forward.

We’ve given ourselves the weekend to mull over our shortlist and on Monday each of us will make our final choice and begin planning/drafting our letters.

By Tobias Hayden

@TobiasHayden

What a range of change!

In this session, using a mini-lesson idea (Make a Change!) from The Big Book Of Writing Mini-lessons, the children generated scores of unique ideas. Here are some of my favourites:

Ideas for changes at home

• Have my own TV in my bedroom
• Change my bedtime to 8.45pm so I can watch Tracy Beaker: The Next Step
• Get a bigger dining table
• Be responsible for taking care of the strawberries
• Go shopping on my own
• Get my own bedroom
• Have some of my own TV time
• More storage in the house
• Visit our house in Peterborough
• Go to bed earlier (7pm)
• Get more responsibility for jobs around the house (hoovering)
• Get rid of the bunk beds

Ideas for changes at school

• Have juice in our water bottles
• Change the end of the school day to 2.45pm
• Be able to choose our desserts
• Do more coding lessons
• Have a class pet
• Get more playground equipment
• Play Roblox on the school computers
• Watch cartoons while eating our lunch
• Have more PE lessons
• Change the lunch menu more often
• Enter more competitions like the British Library superhero comic one
• Come to school by myself

How useful did the children find this mini-lesson?

There were quite mixed reviews for this lesson in terms of its usefulness. Some children found this lesson ‘very useful‘, but several found it to be ‘only a little bit useful‘ or ‘not at all useful‘. The reasons given are insightful. For instance, one girl thought that there were just not many things that she wanted to change at home or school. I should point out though that she still had six of her own ideas for the writing project.

When asked what she wanted a mini-lesson in next, she said, “I don’t know!” This can happen in any writing classroom. I will probably conference with her tomorrow to dig deeper into what she needs. I often ask the children their opinions on the instruction I’m giving them. This way, I can build up a more accurate picture of the collective and individual needs of my pupils.

When we invite children to generate ideas of their own, they develop as writers in profound ways. Missing out this part of the writing process means that children are only ever writing about someone else’s idea. In doing so, we risk alienating children from writing. Far better to give them the strategies and techniques that can support the formulation of their own ideas in a socially sympathetic community of writers. I look forward to seeing which unique idea they each choose to take forward for their persuasive letter.

By Tobias Hayden

@TobiasHayden

This book takes sentence-level instruction seriously and invites you to teach children about sentences in a way that helps them write what they mean.

We know that formal grammar instruction has always had a negative impact on children’s writing development (Young & Ferguson 2021). However, the types of instruction suggested within the pages of this book are far more promising (Young & Ferguson 2020). Any work around sentences should be in the service of developing children’s style as writers. Inspired by the writing of Nora Bacon and her book The Well-Crafted Sentence, we describe sentence work, and by extension work on style, as being about helping children:

• Share their writing voice and identity.
• Achieve the purpose they have for their writing.
• Write with clarity and simplicity.
• Develop, elaborate and embellish their initial ideas.

Navigating the book

The English National Curriculum’s programme of study for writing isn’t very well organised, nor does it give much advice on developing children’s understanding of sentences. At times you get the impression that certain items have been plucked from the air and arbitrarily assigned to particular year groups without a rationale. This is a shame because, as we have described earlier, knowledge about sentences is useful, and children find it interesting when they see how it can enhance their ability to write meaningful and successful texts. If we want children to develop their own style, to write with their own identity, to elaborate and write with a playfulness, and if we want children to write with an honest simplicity, and for their writing to be well received by their readers, then we need to ensure they are knowledgeable about sentences. With this in mind, we have organised our sentence-level mini-lessons in such a way that they reflect what children are trying to achieve in their writing. This allows teachers to ask: what is it my class actually needs instruction in?

Our categories include the following sentence areas:

• Focused sentences
• Balanced sentences
• Developed sentences

Our first category is Focused sentences. These lessons look to focus children on the most important parts of their writing: their nouns and verbs. This is about focusing on the subjects they choose to write about and what those subjects mean and do. Nouns and verbs are what matter most to young writers which is lucky because this is what forms the basis of well-focused sentences. When children are composing mentally, their thoughts will be on the subject of their sentence or what their mind is seeing or feeling in terms of action or emotion. When these two things come together, children have the basis of their sentence. That’s why, when working with a child who might be experiencing ‘writer’s block’, it’s useful to ask what they wish to make their main focus? Who or what is involved in their composition? What is occurring? What emotion do they want to convey?

Next, we have Balanced sentences. Mini-lessons about crafting well-balanced sentences are vital. Without them, children can’t make connections. They can’t bring their thoughts and ideas together. Balanced sentences help children to share their reasoning, provide contrasts, establish conditions and discuss alternatives with their readers.

Finally, part of good craft is writing Developed sentences which push your reader’s thinking, understanding and imaginings. This can sometimes involve making a film with words (Young et al. 2021). At other times, we need to extend, clarify or qualify our thinking. Whatever the purpose, it’s about elaborating on or decorating our meaning using artistic flair or poetic metaphor.

We believe orientating your writing teaching to what your class is wanting (or struggling) to achieve within these areas is far healthier and more effective than simply following a predefined writing scheme or unit plan. For example, we hope that teachers will turn to our pages on Focused Sentences if they notice that their class lacks the ability to write with clarity and ease. We want you to turn to our lessons on Balanced Sentences if you feel children could benefit from giving more attention to the connections they are trying to make in their writing. And we want you to teach mini-lessons about Developed Sentences if children’s writing could benefit from providing elaboration and artistic detail.

£5.95

Please note this is a digital resource. After successful payment, PayPal will automatically redirect you to your download.

By Inka Vann

Why invite your class to make requests and suggestions about their writing lessons? When children are invited to actively participate in how their writing classroom is run, it can improve both their motivation and their writer identity. We know that for children to get the most out of their writing lessons, they need to feel like they have some agency and ownership over what they write and how they write it (Young & Ferguson 2021).

Considering themselves as writers

Last week, I asked my class to think about how they can ‘help me to help them’ by making suggestions and requests for writing lessons. We talked about how the suggestions they make benefit both them and I as fellow writers, as I can build mini lessons, author’s chair sessions and our writing station around their writerly needs.

Spending time considering what might be an appropriate request was important in guiding the class to make manageable suggestions; I didn’t want them to make impractical requests that would potentially need to be denied. In this case, we agreed that all suggestions should be polite, fair, and specific.

Suggestions for Author’s Chair

It helped that prior to this lesson, my class had already partaken in a mini-lesson called ‘The Rights & Responsibilities of the Author’s Chair’.

Reproduced with permission from Young and colleagues (2021 p.40)

This meant that they had already considered what the purpose of an author’s chair session really was and could now think more critically about how they thought that time could be most profitably used. It was interesting to see how, independently of each other, many pupils wanted very similar things from our author’s chair sessions! 

The most popular suggestions were:

1. For me to participate in an Author’s Chair session, so that they could learn more about how to receive feedback from others.

The girl who suggested this said that it would be ‘good to hear what you say when people give you advice.’

2. For us to have special guests during Author’s Chair, so a wider range of feedback can be heard.

3. To hold an Author’s Chair session with new audiences – e.g. other classes or year groups.

4. For separate Author’s Chair sessions to be held for Class Writing Projects and for Personal Writing Projects.

5. For us to ensure that Author’s Chair sessions are fair. Some children felt we needed to ensure that a wider range of participants joined in.

This allowed me as a writer-teacher to reflect on my class’ writerly needs. Now that they are building their confidence as writers, they evidently want to share their writing with wider audiences. This was great news. 

Suggestions for lessons

Children needed a little more prompting when suggesting mini-lessons to me. I think they are so used to it being me who decides what they need instruction in most. Generally speaking though, their requests fell into two categories:

1. Mini-lessons on particular writing processes they struggle with. Interestingly, planning seemed to be the most popular request and, incidentally, this is the stage of our Class Writing Project that many of them are currently at!

2. Mini-lessons related to our current Class Writing Project, Flash Fiction. I could see that they had internalised our product goals for this project, as some of the requests related specifically to how to achieve these. 

One boy had recognised from our product goal list that the key moment of our Flash Fiction stories needed to be ‘slowed down’ – he also shared with me that this was something he recognised needing to do in his writing more generally.

From these particular requests, I could tell that my class had developed a strong sense of what our next mini lessons should be in relation to where we were at with our Flash Fiction pieces. However, as well as receiving these more pertinent suggestions, some children made requests that were quite general or not well articulated, revealing their relative inexperience as reflective writers.

Other suggestions

Many children were enthusiastic about the idea of writing competitions, again, informing me that they would like to widen the audiences of their writing.

A few students suggested that we undertake ‘group conferences’, where I work with a small group of them who have a similar need.

Finally, pupils who have developed their own smaller publishing houses for personal projects were keen for opportunities to collaborate with one another.

Moving forward 

This mini-lesson allowed me to develop a much greater understanding of my class as writers and what they see as important in writing sessions, namely: the option of sharing their developing pieces with wider audiences regularly and mini-lessons that attend to their most pressing writing needs.

In terms of understanding individual writers, this mini-lesson also gave me the opportunity to see which children were not well-versed in articulating their needs and understanding the bigger picture of our writing projects.

By Inka Vann

I wrote this for my younger brother’s class because I really wanted them to know all about our cat.

Emma

This blogpost is about a Year 4 child called Emma (pseudonym) and her information text journey.

This is Emma’s ‘speedy book’ which she wrote to use as plan for her more extended information text.

What I liked about using a ‘speedy book’ to plan is that I was able to jot down ideas, but it was almost like publishing because people from the younger classes got to read it.

Emma

Emma planned her information text using a planning strategy called ‘speedy books’. These are small A5 picture books which the children write for younger readers but also to help them organise their thoughts for their more extended pieces. Emma used her speedy book to help her write her final information text. She worked on her piece over the course of about six writing sessions before publishing it (see below).

As you can see, Emma extended and elaborated on what she wrote in her ‘speedy book’ You can also see how the speedy book helped keep her piece focused and cohesive.

How did she work?

As always, we examined mentor texts during our genre-study week. Inspired by one of the texts she found in the KS1 Genre-Booklet Information And Me Books, Emma decided to base her particular information text on her own cat.

Below is a snapshot of some other aspects of Emma’s journey through the writing process encompassing: idea generation, drafting, revising and editing. On these pages, she demonstrates strong feelings of: self-efficacy, agency and self-regulation as she manages her composition. I keep a record of every pupil conference, so I know I didn’t confer with her during this particular project. This is heartening as it indicates her confidence levels were high enough to take her idea all the way through to publication independently. This is great evidence for her writing portfolio.

What information did she add in?

As we read the final published version, we can see that there is a good deal of personal information about the relationship Emma has with her cat. In revealing this to her readers, she also allows us to infer that this might be true about cats’ behaviour in general (sleeping on her bed all night, waiting for her on the stairs to get home, hating water, enjoying playing outside with the other cats, going missing for a few days etc.). We learn more about cats from reading this piece than we did before but we also learn more about Emma too.

On her final page, she decides to share information more explicitly with her reader by sharing a list of items you would need to take care of a cat, and a second list of all the cat breeds that she knows.

Personally, I really enjoyed this style of non-fiction writing with the blend between the more generic and objective information about a topic and the bond that the author has with their chosen subject. As a class teacher, it also enables me to know my children as well as playing a key role in strengthening the writing community as we learn more from each other and about each other’s lives.

What else did I enjoy about this piece?

I really like the poem Emma included at the end of her text (see below). I’m pretty sure she is referencing Puss In Boots from Shrek based on the description, but I really like the way she just alludes to this and doesn’t name him. Instead, she prefers to refer to him as ‘that’ cat. I like to think the spelling of perfect as ‘purfect’ is a deliberate pun although on her ‘trying things out’ page it is circled as a temporary spelling. However, as she took this piece through the editing process, it is perfectly possible that she found the correct spelling then decided to keep it. I’ll have to ask her.

Phoenix is a cat
She’s not like that cat
She doesn’t wear boots
She doesn’t have a sword or a hat
But that’s OK
She’s purfect the way she is.

I love the vibrancy and celebratory nature of the front cover. Who wouldn’t want to grab it from the shelf and read it? I appreciate the presence of the purple mouse toy which was referenced on page 4. There is further attention to detail with the pumpkins playing the role of the dots on the letter ‘i’ in the words Kitty and Pumpkin. The pattern on the word Kitty is like the fur of her calico cat even down to the distribution of the grey and orange fur (25% coverage) and the white fur (75% coverage). A sublime detail.

Publishing is such an important process for so many reasons, but what I especially like about it is the opportunity it creates for children to be illustrators. It actually opens up a whole new world of potential mini-lessons, especially when making mini-books, and allows children to incorporate their own observations to influence the design decisions they make. Illustrations are part of writing and are another tool we can use to help us share our meaning with our readers.

My favourite thing about this project was that we got to make a ‘speedy book’ first even though it was hard not to add in too much information!

Emma

Final thoughts

It is interesting that Emma already had a lot to say and was almost restricting herself during the planning process. Perhaps this aided her in the organisation and structure of her text and provided a framework for her when she did let her full draft pour out in the next session. What I think is important is that children now have an additional planning strategy in their repertoires and can use it independently when they see fit. And in doing so, they know that they will be producing two books for the price of one.

By Tobias Hayden

@TobiasHayden

By Tobias Hayden

After a couple of drafting sessions where children have been using their ‘speedy books‘ as plans to write more about their topics, today we began revising.

We concentrated on looking at different ways you might begin a non-fiction text with a mini-lesson titled Intriguing introductions.

As always, I try out the mini-lessons I am going to teach in my own writing journal so I can talk through how I did with the class. Yesterday, I taught a mini-lesson called Write a bit, share a bit and this seemed to improve the overall fluency of the children’s drafting.

The first four paragraphs I drafted in advance, but the final one I decided to do with the children, encouraging them to ask me a few questions to prompt me. When you write something and then share it with an audience, they almost automatically enquire about what you have written, and the kinds of questions they ask often nudge you to think of things that you wouldn’t necesssarily have included under your own steam.

Once you have got your words down then, for me, the fun starts. You get to play around with what you’ve got, add things in, take things out, think about how you want your audience to react, paint with words etc.

Revision is the process when I see the most gains in writing quality, and where I can really focus my teaching on the product goals (either through whole class mini-lessons, or small group/one-to-one pupil conferencing) which were established during our genre-study week.

Coming up with ways to start your non-fiction pieces off with a bang is a lot of fun and the children found this lesson really useful. It stimulated a lot of talk and sharing. In fact, today we had a first-timer in our ‘author’s chair’ because he was so happy with what he had produced.

I must confess that I didn’t know what The Norris Nuts was, but I do now! And that surely is the point of an information text. Coming up, we have a few more sessions allocated for revision before we look to ‘tidy up our pieces’ in preparation for our publishing party.

@TobiasHayden

By Tobias Hayden

Today, during the third session of our class project (information texts), we experimented with a planning technique called ‘speedy books’. Having chosen our favourite ideas yesterday, we spent today’s thirty minutes of writing time turning them into mini-books, but with a difference: these were aimed at an EYFS audience.

What was the purpose of planning in this way?

1. To support the organisation and structure of our main texts.

2. To enable children to have the opportunity to plan with simplicity and with a genuine audience in mind.

3. To create an actual text that could be read and enjoyed.

Why not just use a box-up grid, or any other recognised planning technique?

Well, there are many legitimate and useful planning techniques out there, many of which are made available in a Writing for Pleasure classroom. But, since writing can be an idiosyncratic process, the more children know about the different ways that writers plan, the more options they have each time they think about creating a text.

For instance, I always teach children about different drafting approaches one of which is to be a ‘discoverer’ (children write a first draft and then this becomes their plan to write a second draft). And this is essentially what we were doing today; however, I think what separates today’s technique from the others is that in using it the children were creating a complete and authentic text which could be enjoyed by a real audience, and their ‘plan’ now exists as a book in its own right. We will see next week how it supports the drafting of their longer compositions.

How was it taught?

I shared my example with the children (see below) and we discussed it in relation to some simple product goals. It was left up on display, while a few others from The Writing for Pleasure Centre’s EYFS class projects were placed on the children’s tables to act as mentor texts – I often find that, even for a simple text like this one, I need to see examples while I am writing to remind myself exactly what I am aiming for.

Soft Play With My Girl

I created a template with boxes and lines, a decorative spine and a date stamp on a blank front cover. I limited it to five pages. The emphasis was on speed, so I wanted to ensure the format was already taken care of so the children could focus on their text. You could just as easily staple together some blanks pages of A4, but I wanted it to feel a bit special.

What did the children create?

Things In The Computer

My Day In The Mosque

Spiders Are Real

Southend!

Were they successful?

These speedy books are peppered with… information! It is clear that children were writing from a position of strength and were able to focus on what they wanted to say on each page. And each of those pages says something new. The books also contain a good deal of subject specific vocabulary and, crucially, they are entirely original in conception reflecting children’s writing realities. Finally, they represent a valuable starting point for a longer draft thus fulfilling the purpose of a plan.

What happened during author’s chair time?

I found that today, perhaps because of the clarity provided by the simplicity of the speedy books, more children were able to participate in the discussion. Also, the comments (likes, suggested changes and questions) were drawing out more information from the author which automatically contributed to the beginning of the revision process. I could see how starting from this low floor would enable everyone to build up their text.

Wasn’t this a waste of time for the more experienced writers though?

Apparently not. I had thought that some children might be put off by the EYFS-nature of the process. However, the feedback was that the mini-lesson was overwhelmingly ‘very useful’ (24 out of 26 writers) with only two children evaluating it as ‘quite useful’.

What will happen in session four?

On Monday, we will have our speedy books out on our tables to act as our plan as we begin drafting into our class project books.

What will happen to the speedy books at the end of the class project?

They will be given to the EYFS classes to read and enjoy. Some will be given to younger siblings at home. I already have some in my bag for the weekend to take home and read to my daughter!

@TobiasHayden

By Tobias Hayden

Today was session two in our class project and we were generating ideas using a technique called Thinking ‘faction’. This is where you use your knowledge of fictional worlds, settings, characters and events and use them as inspiration for a piece of information writing. This was the first time I have taught this mini-lesson. As usual, I had a go at it in advance, so I could talk it through with the children before inviting them to try it out for themselves. I surprised myself at the ease with which my ideas flowed.

To give some structure, I created a sheet divided up into sections: things from films, things from books, things from TV, things from games/YouTube etc. I set myself a finish line of twenty ideas and it took me about ten minutes to generate fourteen ideas. I explained to the children that this would be a great opportunity to do lots of talking (talk for writing is extremely important throughout the writing process) while we were doing it and that I would be joining in with them to cross my finish line during today’s writing time.

What struck me at the end of this session was just how many ideas we had generated as a class. Twenty-eight children, each with at least ten ideas on their pages, had generated many hundreds of ideas in less than twenty minutes. Who says children won’t have anything to write about? Not me.

Tomorrow in session three: Planning using ‘speedy’ books

@TobiasHayden