Put Pen to Paper

Writing has always been an area that most students seem to struggle with, admittedly, I have also struggled to find ways to engage students.

Recently, my eyes have been opened to the need of student voice.  How can I help them when I don’t know what they actually need or want?

I recently came across an article based on questions asked at drama based workshops held at a Hamilton primary school.

The students were in the three groups based on year level, years 3-4, years 5-6 and years 7-8.  As I teach years 7-8 I will only use their data.

The students were asked, what they liked about writing.  

The year 7-8 answer was:

• having free writing with their own topic  

They were also asked what they struggled with when writing.  To which they responded: 

• Ideas - getting more than one (I’m not sure if they meant they struggle to come up with many ideas for one topic, or they are not given enough topics to write about)

• Story progression (I understand how this could be difficult especially when writing tasks or topics are set, and the student has no experience of the topic)

• Making the words flow (I tell my students: read, read, read to build up their vocabulary base, plus a  list of banned adjectives, e.g. nice, big)

• Physical writing (eek, even I struggle with this nowadays. To help overcome this, my students need to complete their writing in an exercise book.  To help with penmanship one of our learning intentions is to take pride in our work, therefore working slower to produce neater and tidier work if need be, quality over quantity)

• Story development (as with story progression)

• Disappointing your teacher  (I don’t ever want my students to feel disappointed for this reason)

• ALL LEVELS some students said it was boring.  When questioned further, in 99% of all cases it came down to them not having an idea. (Again, this shows students need to relate to the topic they are writing about)

© Judi Billcliff Rainbow Poetry 2019  www.rainbowpoetry.co.nz

In term 2, I spent more time breaking down writing, than actually writing stories or text.  

I started with something simple like nouns and adjectives. Asking the students what a noun was, what an adjective was. Surprisingly, they were not all confident in answering those questions.

I put up a picture of animals in a jungle and asked students to give me nouns from the picture, and adjectives, and then we moved onto verbs, and adverbs.  Pushing the students more, we looked at similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and alliteration, all the time using just one photo.  Granted the more objects in a photo the easier it is.

At the end of last term Room 6 made a huge shift in their writing test, with over 25% of students increasing their e-asTTle grade by 3 sublevels, 10% by 4 sublevels and 19% by 5 sublevels.  Surprisingly, similes featured aplenty in their writing.

Student feedback: “In my opinion I like the writing sessions that we are doing because we are going into more details about our writing which I think is good because then we can use the details in our writing test.”