Newsletter – 04 August 2023

Writing is a highly demanding task for young learners. Children are learning to write alphabetic letters, match these to sounds, write the sounds in order, organise their ideas into a sentence, remember and use English spelling patterns correctly, develop their ideas, select interesting words, apply correct boundary punctuation, and record all this neatly and with correct spacing and capitalisation. That is an awful lot to do at once and it is not a wonder that many children struggle to coordinate all these skills when they are just beginning.

Sweller’s ‘Cognitive Load Theory’ (2011) asserts that the human brain can only process a small amount of new information at once. With lots of time and practice, skills become more automatically recalled from long-term memory and require less conscious effort. By adulthood, most people can manage these various writing skills simultaneously. However as capable writers, we need to remember that it takes several years for most children to grasp and coordinate all these related writing skills.

To support young writers at RGLPS, we teach the writing process with an instructional focus on different skills at each phase of the process. This scaffolds the learning for students and helps children focus on what skills it is important to use at each step:

• Pre-writing – Talking about your writing ideas; gathering and organising ideas.
• Planning – Sequencing ideas, developing plot, characters, setting; sorting information for an information report; planning for a specific writing genre.
• Drafting – Translating ideas into a written piece and genre. Rereading the writing as you go to build on ideas and ensure writing flows and makes sense.
• Revising – Revising the writing by rereading it, adding, and removing ideas, modifying the text, substituting in different vocabulary and ensuring writing is coherent.
• Editing – Checking the writing for correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation to prepare it for an audience.
• Publishing – Creating a final audience ready piece; attending to presentation, layout, handwriting neatness and ensuring accurate spelling, grammar and punctuation.

As you can see, there are a huge range of skills that children need to learn to become competent writers.

Here are some ways you can support your child at home with writing:

• Help your child focus on the skills needed for the writing stage they are working through. Focus on recording their ideas and thinking first. Only spend time checking for spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors after the draft has been completed.
• Provide specific feedback about what your child has done well using a Feedback Sandwich – positive feedback, improvement tip, positive feedback. This provides useful and specific feedback and maintains learner motivation and engagement in writing.
• Work on small sections of writing at a time when editing – correctly a long piece can be quite daunting for young learners.
• Ask your child to make their editing corrections themselves. There is little gained from an adult ‘correcting’ a child’s writing with a red pen and it also tends to discourage the writer.
• If wanting to focus on punctuation or spelling, ask your child to read over a completed piece or section of their writing and try and find the errors. You can turn this into a game to make it fun. For example, tell them there are three pieces of punctuation errors that need to be added to a sentence. Can they find them?
• Above all, be positive and excited about your child’s writing. Writing is an enormously complex lifelong skill and we want to keep them as motivated as we can!