Writing for a purpose: Make it authentic! My 5&6 year olds write every day and love it!

Having an authentic need to write each day is important, and verbalizing this to my students is critical. I want my students  not only to love writing, but to realise that writing is a way we can record events, our learning and express ourselves. We spend a lot of time discussing why a book was written and the author’s intent / purpose.

This week the children have written a journal recount in their personal diaries, a congratulations letter to a family in our grade, factual statements / information as part of our inquiry and a Learner Profile statement. Having varied reasons to write means that my student’s writing diet has variety and purpose.

A journal recount is important, but it’s ‘thinker’s writing’ that I’m looking closely at. ‘Thinker’s writing’ is when my students use all that they have learnt to write in a different format. I’ve been focussing on Information Texts and factual statements. Today we read a big book about spiders to support our inquiry into living and non-living. They were asked to write five pieces of factual information that they learnt from the text. I’ve included samples of their work in this post.

The above piece of writing is a journal entry from a student this week. This is independent writing. When looking beyond the mixed capital and lower case letters, this is an impressive piece of writing. This child has correctly used an apostrophe of ownership, exclamation marks and the correct ‘too’. His attempt at spelling celebrating is wonderful. It’s so exciting to see each student’s writing development. My students are in the final term of their first year of school and they are wonderful readers as well.

Cheers Nina