Professional Reading #3 -

Title of Book/Reading/Study Programme

Best Practices in writing instruction (2nd edition) - Chapter 1. Designing an Effective Writing Program

Author/s or Lecturer/s or Speaker/s

Edited - Steve Graham, Charles A.MacArthur, Jill Fitzgerald

Motivation

The motivation for this reading is the want to improve my Writing programme. As part of my role as a CoL teacher, I am inquiring into raising the achievement of my students in Literacy, with a specific focus on writing.

How will it help me? How has it helped me?

Key takeaways and what it means for me: 
• Foster a love for writing. Establishing a good mood for writing in the classroom is important. 
• Make student writing visible - display on walls, share to newspapers i.e. Toitoi
• Have high but realistic expectations for writers
• Provide enough support for my writers so that they can write i.e. use of models, teacher sessions, word banks, front loading, peer support, word cards  
• Student Voice about topics they want to write about - I need to collect student more frequently 
• Keep them engaged and classroom routines around writing.

• Get my students writing often and for different purposes including persuade, inform & explaining. 
• Support students to write for authentic purposes i.e. letters to people in the community, a play and then students acting it, lists for shopping.
• Write across the curriculum FREQUENTLY
• Write for real audiences and purposes
• Personal choice - my students LOVE free write! Yay! 
• Give them extended periods of time to write about single topics 
• Teach the strategies to write >> PLAN, DRAFT, REVISE, EDIT.
• The importance of teaching the foundamental writing skills

So What?

I'm always trying to find ways for authentic learning purposes and audiences and I really enjoy this. Pulling out the learning and integrating this across the curriculum so that my students are writing more frequently is a goal for the next few weeks.
A change to my writing programe for my learners is the introduction of new spelling rules every 2 weeks on a Monday through our Reading groups e.g. short a and long a vowel sounds. Within the 2 weeks, students will be consolidating, identifying and using this rule in their writing and reading. For example, looking for specific spelling rule in passage of text. 
Another change to my writing programme is that for this term, we will be predominately writing in our books. Our devices will be used for publishing and sharing our writing and the process of writing on our blogs. I hope that this will help eliminate factors that disrupt the writing flow and therefore have a better quantity of writing output.