What's in the news?

When I first started teaching at Roydon Primary in 2001 each child had 'passport to the world' folders in which they collected work about world news. I love the global element of learning and have tried very hard to incorporate world events into my mantles, for example monsoons in India as part of Asian elephant rescue centre and successful/unsuccessful shuttle launches when we were STARS (space transportation and restoration specialists (I have many more examples...)

Participation in Etwinning, Comenius projects and more recently quadblogging have all helped promote the similarities and differences in countries and cultures, but I am aware that I have drifted away from ensuring that children all know about major world news. One way of achieving this came from my friend Jenni Porter, who uses CBBC Newsround each Friday so that the news is shared and talked about. I have endeavoured to do this, but have traditionally been out of the classroom on a Fri pm, so aimed to do it during other whole class times. Quite often it slipped off my list though.

This term I have decided to try and incorporate the use of CBBC Newsround into an adapted version of Julia Skinner's 5 sentence challenge, which will be one of my PPA lessons. As we do read, write inc, this provides one opportunity to write beyond that.

How the 'almost hour' will look

 An aspect of the news will be shared during talk time, using CBBC, then the teacher will model juicy (wow, power) words about the events and thoughts / feelings / opinions surrounding it to enrich the children's vocabulary. These will be written onto coloured bits of card and scattered around the IWB (yes, I know you can do it interactively, but you can hand these bits of card out to the children). The expectation is that the children write 5 - only 5 - sentences of their own. There will be a time limit on this, so that valuable time can be given to the reflection / self-assessment part. I am a strong believer in the mini-plenary, so although a TA may be used to work with a different guided group each week, the teacher will be the one who moves around, encouraging, thinking out loud, then making a huge fuss of the amazing sentences that are being written.

 One of the first ones we will look at is the US big chill, then I may find other new species like the hairy troll bug. Who couldn't be inspired by that?!

Inspiring writing

After looking through pupil asset this holiday I have been trying to think of ways to further inspire writing at East Harling, as this is an area that needs improving. As SENDco and the person with responsibility for assessment, I need to be aware of all the children who are struggling and I feel it is my duty to support the teachers to support the children. Running a Film Club for year 6 children targets some literacy skills as they write reviews and we discuss the films. I can also have a direct influence on children in KS1, but need to make sure that I support the children and teachers in between.

As a school we have just introduced Read, Write inc and although I was the biggest sceptic, after using it for a few weeks I can see how it will support struggling writers. This is only part of the solution though, so I am thinking of other ways of creating a writing culture at school. Many of you will know how I use a dramatic enquiry approach to teaching and this lends itself very nicely to purposeful writing across the curriculum, for example my digital literacy project and 'A Waspish Sort of Problem'. This has been embraced by East Harling and we have agreed as a school that teachers will teach though drama at least once a term. 

 Introducing blogging will further help develop a writing culture and this is top of my list for 2014. I will also let teachers know about Julia Skinner's 100 word and 5 sentence challenge. I have used Julia's ideas effectively with my own pictures as additional creative writing  and guided group sessions. I have shared my 'Talking Pictures' visual literacy pack (laminated stills and art work) with our year 3 teacher and she reported that the children loved it. The pictures include a selection of Jacek Yerka's art work, which I have blogged about here. 

 
I use a range of interesting pictures, then ask questions to inspire talk, before descriptive writing. The pictures are great for comprehension, lending themselves nicely to in-depth inferences and deductions. When writing, starting with simple observations about the picture, then building on them can inspire some great sentence writing. We write on white boards so that editing can be done easily (I have found that this reduces anxiety for children). I laminated the questions below to support teaching assistants and parent helpers deliver effective guided sessions, as they may need support with development of questions. 

This works well in my class, but I need to think about promoting writing across the school. These are my ideas so far. They are not original ideas, but ways of developing writers: 

• Hold a whole school writing competition each month. This can be part of my assemblies, so kills two birds with one stone (I'm all for time saving!)
• Get East Harling blogging
• Employ some reporters to write about sporting events or other special occasions
• Start a newspaper club, managed by a parent
• Host drama days 
• Participate in Livewriting
• Start a book club for year 4/3 children, managed by a parent, to meet once a month
• Start a creative writing group
• Create a blog with resources that teachers can use

I sent a message to my good friend Jenni about the last point, as she was an AST for English and has delivered many workshops and training on writing. She was way ahead as usual and had started a blog called 'Never Mind the Spag'. It hosts a collection of resources to support writing that have been used successfully before. Taking the time to share things is what makes Jenni the inspirational leader she is, and I was chuffed when she invited me to blog with her. I have added my favourite pictures from Machinarium and Tiny Bang Story as these have worked for me in the past. 

   

I hope that these are of use to you too. Don't forget of course the fantastic Literacy Shed, which hosts a huge range of resources to inspire writing.