At present, too many children are leaving school feeling the effects of inadequate writing skills. Ofsted and the DfE have repeatedly acknowledged that progress and attainment in writing has been consistently poor in England.
In a bid to turn the tide on writing underachievement, educators have rightly been interested in developing children’s ‘writing fluency’. This typically means developing children’s oral language, spelling, handwriting and sentence-level skills so that they can write freely and happily. This is sensible because we know that children who don’t internalise these ‘basic’ skills of writing early into their educational journey can go on to underperform and even experience school failure. In contrast, when these skills are well established, children have the cognitive space to focus on other aspects of writing and being a writer.
At The Writing For Pleasure Centre, we don’t want the youngest of children engaging in extended writing projects since these are often developmentally inappropriate. Instead, we build up to extended writing projects through a process of making short list books, picturebooks and chapterbooks during the EYFS-KS1. These books are an opportunity for children to use and apply their developing transcriptional skills in context. Research is consistent on the benefits of developing children’s transcription and composition concurrently (see LINK for more details).
If you’re not sure whether your school is currently delivering best practice in terms of transcription instruction, consider filling out our provision audit here.
For more on delivering encoding instruction, see our book: Getting Children Up & Running As Writers.
For more details on teaching at the sentence-level, see our book: Sentence-Level Instruction For 3-11 Year Olds
For more details on teaching list book, picturebook and chapter book projects, click here.