Teaching Writing in my Class

I had my literacy observation recently and one of the  criteria is to record our lesson and then analyse the  lesson with a critical buddy. My critical buddy is Paula Were who does PLD for Writing at our school.

My goals from my last observation were-

Specific development of vocabulary eg clines

Continue building power words

Seeking the very best choice to avoid ‘over blown’ language

I not only wanted to achieve the above goals as a teacher but also wanted my students to to achieve their goals to become better writers. The group that I am teaching is  mixed ability group and their goals are to write interesting stories in order to create impact on their audience. To achieve this goal they have the following Success Criteria-

• Use detail for ideas
• Use correct punctuations
• Use Powerful words and similes
• Use dialogue
• use emotive language

Connections with Reading and writing

To start the lesson I made connections to the text that they had read the previous day.

I drew their attention to the new words and phrases they had read in text. I made sure that they understood the meanings of all the new vocabulary so that it becomes easy for them to use these in their writing.

Global Connections

The picture prompt that I used was that of a roller coaster. This was because I wanted to make connections with the recent incident that happened at Dream world.

Specific development of vocabulary

Most of my students use simple words in their writing or else they may use overblown words that really do not make much sense. To help them use specific vocabulary I made clines.

Making connections with culture

After explaining the word cline I asked my students if they could make any cultural connections to the roller coaster. It is important that we acknowledge and cherish what our students bring with them. In this case the students said that the roller coaster looked like a Taniwha, an eel, a huge wave or a whale, a dragon's tail and a tunnel.

I reminded students several times about their goals and gave them hints on how they could transfer the new words learnt to their writing.  Here is what they produced in about 5 minutes.

Revisiting Learning intentions and success criteia
To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Follow up task

A follow up task was to ask students to highlight detail, powerful words, dialogue and emotive words in a text on roller coasters. This was a winding off activity that would help them to remember their goals. Here is the text that was given.

To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Reflection and feedback - The feedback that I got from my critical friend was very good. To sum up she said that the connections with the reading and writing, culture and student goals were very elegantly done.

Link to my plan for the above lesson

Finding Fractions of a Region - Language of Maths

After doing two weeks of fractions in my class I felt that most students in the class would be comfortable halving and quartering fractions of a region. So I decided to work with my students who are achieving low in Maths.


To my surprise, none of the five students could show me the different ways we could share a cake into quarters. I felt very disappointed.

The question that I gave them was this:

I also gave them a square piece of paper that they could experiment to work out quarters. But somehow it did not seem to work. None of students seemed confident to ask questions or talk about their thinking.

As I started to explain the problem I realised that my students did not have the language to participate in a discussion. So I stopped teaching to the plan and decided to expose my students to the language that was required to participate in a discussion. I used think boards so that each child could record their understanding.

After remembering, repeating and discussing the question a number of times, the students had the words to explain their understanding.

Tomorrow I will be giving an different problem on quarters to the same group of students and hopefully they will understand and be able to solve the problem.

Today instead of giving another problem to the same group, I made them experts and they had to share their learning in a group.  All the students explained and demonstrated the different ways they could share a cake in quarters. They did it beautifully and that was because they had the language to explain their thinking. It built their confidence and left them motivated towards their learning.

In future I will make sure that each child in the class has the words to explain their thinking. It becomes all the more important when most of my students have english as their second language.