Genre and Grammar have been an important part of the process. The sessions based on genre and grammar were useful in developing my subject knowledge. Completing the analysis activity of different text types helped me to understand the stages in texts. It was particularly useful to look at a range of texts which are taught by primary school teachers. I was able to take this work back to school and analyse text types used in class. The sessions on grammar have led me to become more confident as Literacy leader in my school.
During the course of the year a range of text types have been taught. Although many of the activities we looked at within the sessions were too tricky for KS1 children, it was useful for my subject knowledge and gave me ideas for how to identify features in texts at KS1. Much of the work completed in the Autumn term was developing talk with the children. I focused on simple repetitive texts and used the storytelling approach so that children could learn and adapt the stories. During the year, I have also introduced writing toolkits where we focus on the grammar in the model text and replicate it in our own texts. Each lesson now starts with a grammar warm up focus, similar to that of a Maths mental and oral starter.
Noun and verb game
Ask for a list of nouns and then verbs. Children then invent sentences that include a noun and a verb from the lists. |
Join game
Children are provided with two short sentences. They are asked to use a conjunction to join the sentences to make one sentence. |
Drop in
Children are provided with a very simple sentence. Children are asked to ‘drop in’ something extra, e.g. adjectives or adverbs. |
Deconstruction – Deconstructing a text helps children to internalise the sense of structure in a text. At the point of deconstructing a text, children know the text very well and have internalised the text. As a class, the pattern of the text is discussed and notes are created. As children in Year 1 find it tricky to write notes, this is done as a whole class. The text is divided into sections, which works very well when teaching young children to use paragraphs. Joint construction – Once the class have deconstructed a text, they are ready to jointly construct a new text as a class. The teacher and class use the deconstructed text patterns to create a new text. Shared writing is extremely important at this stage. Each stage of writing is modelled by the teacher. Joint construction has made an enormous impact on the teaching of writing at my school.
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“I don’t worry about what to write as it’s already in my head”. “The children in my class have become much more confident in analysing patterns in texts. They are now confident in independently deconstructing texts.” |
For the younger or weaker writers in my school this means that when they settle to write, they already know what they are going to say. Deconstruction and joint construction have impacted enormously into the teaching of writing in my school. All Literacy lessons have been judged as at least good, or even outstanding. The modelling of writing is now a particular strength in the teaching of writing.
Teachers feel that their children are much more aware of genre patterns.
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