Inquiry focus 2022:
For the past couple months, I have been asking myself
"how can I help children to come up with their ideas independently for writing?"
"how can I get children talking and ideas flowing easily?"
Focus group: 6 children
Writing at: early year 1 to early year 2.
I have identified a few key reasons why this group is struggling to write however decided to focus on just one: ideas.
The struggle with ideas:
-There has been a reliance on ideas coming from me for writing. I realised that I have been in the habit of feeding ideas to this group instead of finding ways for them to become confident at coming up with ideas themselves.
-During small group time, when asked for their ideas I have often been met with silence. The children in my focus group have difficulty knowing where to start when sharing their ideas with others.
-When writing independently, children in my focus group can write 1-2 sentences in a writing session. They find it very difficult to know what to write.
-Retaining ideas: Students can say a couple of sentences out loud but struggle to retain the words in their head when going to actually write them down.
-Elaborating on ideas: there are a couple of children in this group who are able to come up with one to two ideas and can write several sentences however each sentence is the same idea repeated in a different way.
What have I been doing to improve ideas in writing?
Group activities: Mixed ability groups working on a task together. Tasks have been hands on and have required groups to talk about ideas with each other and agree on ideas before writing them down. During group activities, the noise level in class is not expected to be quiet, it is a collaborative space and children are all free to talk about their ideas with each other.
Voice typing:
I haven't been a fan of voice typing in the past because children often come up with sentences that don't make sense. This is because they didn't check that voice typed words were actually what they said out loud. I have also found that voice typing doesn't encourage children to practice spelling.
However..
A couple of children in this focus group have recently been giving voice typing a go on their iPads and it turns out that these children have plenty of awesome ideas when talking out loud!
Voice recording:
Record yourself on Explain Everything, listen back to the recording and write what you have recorded. This has helped for children who struggle to retain ideas whilst writing them down.
Getting children talking during class lessons: I've learnt to hold back from feeding my class all of the ideas. I realised this just encouraged children to rely on me for ideas and allowed them to zone out during a lesson. Instead, I've gotten into the habit of helping children to actively participate throughout a lesson by turning to their neighbour and sharing ideas.
Elaborating on ideas: We have done several group activities where each child in the group has been asked to come up with a different sentence about the same topic. Learning to elaborate on ideas with repeating ourselves.
A lightbulb moment for me...
I remembered that writing doesn't need to be a silent time all the time! I got into the habit of expecting writing time to be very quiet.. always. I've been working on making writing more fun and collaborative by creating opportunities for children to talk about ideas with each other and learn off each other during writing.
