Tag Archives: young deveoping writers

April 26, 2015 · 3:22 pm

JD – ANZAC Day 2015 – 6, 7 and 8 Year Old Australian Students Respond …

My Grandpa Marches on Anzac Day: Recognizing Anzac Day is an important part of my program each year and needs to be planned and delivered to young children with sensitivity. Using picture story books is the most appropriate way to encourage discussion.

This is a wonderful picture story book which I use every year. The wonderful illustrations inspire our display. This year two children drew a large portrait of an Anzac soldier with other students painting. We made poppies in our classroom with my student’s Grandparents or special friend who visited school last week. My students then placed their poppies with their special adult onto our display.

One Minute’s Silence: This picture story book is new to me. I decided to use this book as a mentor text for a piece of writing. The children were given the heading ‘In one minute’s silence … I’ve chosen a few to share here but each student’s response was very special!

These are rough drafts. My students are responsible for correcting their writing. If required, I will model back their whole piece of writing. Yes, it takes time, but the author needs to have control and ownership at all times.

Cheers Nina

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Tagged as ANZAC, ANZAC Day 2015, Australian Primary Teacher Blog, Independent Writing, Picture story books - ANZAC, young deveoping writers

April 7, 2015 · 7:57 am

IB-PYP Inquiry: Relationships with each other affect how we feel and behave. Visible Thinking – Using Thinking Tools and more…

I’ve been exploring making thinking visible in all curriculum areas. Thinking tools and questioning are being taught and added to a collection of tools the children can choose from to develop perspective, vocabulary and an understanding of their world.

One of the tools I’ve been exploring with my students is Point of View. This tool can be used for all curriculum areas, whether exploring a character from a book, developing a character for a narrative, or to solve and explore a general problem. When children put themselves in the position of others, their empathy and understanding of a problem, situation or character deepens. Our inquiry for the first 8 weeks of the year has been about relationships.

Central Idea: The relationships we have with each other affect how we feel and behave.

What lines of inquiry will define the scope of the inquiry into the central idea?

Self Awareness (LP Attributes, Attitudes, Skills, Mission Statement, Essential Agreement, School Pledge)

How we develop relationships (What is relationship? What relationships do you have in your life? What makes it a relationship?

Roles and behaviours within relationships (Scenarios, Role playing, Photos of LP Attributes, Essential Agreement)

How relationships affect us (Good, Bod, Reflections task board/Think board- develop their own)

What teacher questions/provocations will drive these inquiries?

How do we develop and maintain healthy relationships?

What makes a supportive relationship?

What/why do actions help to build healthy relationships?

My students have been exploring the relationships they have in their world.

Example: Point of View: Friendship and why we need to have more than one best friend. My role is to record my student’s ideas and not mine, but I think they covered all bases! 🙂

Brainstorm: A good friend…

The Point of View has been a fantastic tool to help sort friendship and playground issues which is part of building healthy relationships. Young children can be egocentric and developing their understanding that there can be other views has led to a very inclusive group of young learners.

The children have also used Point of View to understand the behaviours of a book character and to develop their own characters and plots when writing.

Cheers Nina

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Tagged as Australian Primary Teacher Blog, Early Years - Laying the Foundations, educators working collaboratively, Fellowship Program, IB Concepts, IB Learner Profile, IB-PYP, Inquiry Learning, Point of View Thinking Tool, relationships, thinking tools, young deveoping writers, young writers

November 6, 2012 · 8:11 pm

Loving these: Can’t wait to get my hands on them… PM Sounds In Words

The PM Sounds in Words – will love using these…

The PM Sounds in Words series explores phonological awareness in a meaningful context, in a PM context. It enables children to become aware of the sounds made by many regular letter patterns that can be found in high frequency and interest words. The series enables children to hear the sounds, say the sounds, read the sounds and write the sounds. There are four PM Sounds in Words sets; each set comprises 10 Little Books and 1 Big Book with IWB software. Cengage – Nelson

We’ve recently purchased a set of the PM Sounds in Words Big Books and I’m looking forward to using them to support my classroom program. I’m a huge fan of PM and have written many times about the PM Writing Genre Big Books. I’ll be writing about how I use these in my classroom in future posts. If you’re looking for further information contact Christine Manns christinemanns.nelsonsales@cengage.com for expert advice.

Cheers Nina

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Tagged as Christine Manns, Independent Writing, PM Sounds in Words, Victorian Early Years, young beginning writers, young deveoping writers

March 27, 2011 · 9:54 am

Week 8: Prep – 5&6 Year Olds:- My young writers are amazing me. This post: Journal Writing, Individual Language Experience Set Writing & PrepD Student Led Interactive Writing

I try to post during the week, but life is hectic. I know from emails that many teachers are following my students, and asking for more information. I’ll post something significant soon. I do need to say that my student’s writing parallels their reading development. They will tell you that they are ‘rocking and rolling’. Language Experience is the key.

Independent Journal Writing.

Journal Writing Samples: I always display a range of writing from my class. This is independent writing…and my students live near the beach.

Language Experience: Set Class Sentence composed independently and individually.

Language Experience Sentence: All students write our class orally developed sentence independently. Whilst my students are writing, I’m observing their use od strategies. The Language Experience orally created sentence is: We are eating lunch at school.

PrepD Student Led Interactive Writing.

PrepD Student Led Interactive Writing: Language Experience sentence orally created as a grade: Today we are having a special lunch. I was particularly interested in how they would tackle spelling ‘today’ and ‘special’, and I have to say I’m impressed.