Though some children may appear to be natural writers, it is more often than not a result of having been read to from an early age. Nearly all children have the potential to achieve greater depth, and this course looks at how to get them there. Key to this is providing and exploring excellent models of language and helping children learn to imitate and adapt these - and we’re shown examples of children’s work where this has taken place. It’s a process of teaching writing explicitly so that pupils’ independent writing improves.
The particular example used in this session is a story about a young Howard Carter and an encounter with The Mummy - which stems from a story structure taken from Jack and the Beanstalk. We look at shared writing, and how the structure of great model texts can be assimilated into new themes and ideas - picking up in great detail on language and grammar.
To illustrate this, Christine and Lindsay take us through lots of examples of great children’s literature, and how they have adapted these during shared writing sessions to develop pupils’ skills and understanding. And we think about how schools and teachers might work together to build their own banks of amazing language examples that could be used to help all children develop greater depth writing.
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Christine Chen and Lindsay Pickton
Christine and Lindsay are experienced English specialists based in Kingston upon Thames. They support numerous primary schools, alliances and federations. Both have worked in schools as senior literacy teachers and helped to launch and run school improvement programmes across their borough, and written for publishers including OUP, Pearson and Collins.