Four weeks into the year in the Cognitorium, and we are starting to work on more and more writing sessions. This week, I’m giving an overview of how these sessions are running and what our focus is. We are working towards our Foundation students writing their own complete sentences in about Term 2 or 3, depending on how we progress as a class. But there is much to do, to get them there! Also check out the resources attached to this post!

Write to learn

An initiative of teachers at Brandon Park Primary School, Write to Learn (w2L) is a set of curriculum materials for the teaching of writing. It is inspired by methodologies recommended by The Writing Revolution® within an Australian curriculum context, and combines this with teaching approaches from Explicit Instruction. It has utilised adapted version of the Reading Science in Schools Syntax Scope and Sequence, genre teaching, and interconnections with our knowledge-rich units.

There is no official partnership between Brandon Park Primary / Nathaniel Swain and The Writing Revolution® by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler. THE HOCHMAN METHOD®, THE WRITING REVOLUTION®, and ADVANCING THINKING THROUGH WRITING® are registered trademarks of The Writing Revolution, Inc. The materials in Write2Learn are created as classroom materials to accompany The Writing Revolution®’s methodology and progression of writing skills.

If you haven’t heard much about The Writing Revolution®, some of its core principles are:

the explicit teaching of writing skills, through children’s own writing practice
the centrality of the sentence, as the basic building block of all good writing
the progression from simple to more complex strategies (sentences, to paragraphs, to compositions)
the content (knowledge) about which students write drives the rigour

The purpose of teaching in this way is to ensure that all students become proficient writers, not just those who enjoy writing already. Strategies from TWR can level the playing field, compared to the currently in-vogue free choice writing approaches, and help make writing more manageable and fun. We have already had several reluctant writers in Year 2 completely change their attitude and comfort with writing, as they now understand what we are asking them to do. This approach also allows stronger writers to more explicitly manipulate their language choices for certain effects, and understand the why and how of good writing and grammar.

Our **adapted version of the scope and sequence (free to download)** based on RSiS Syntax Scope and Sequence

In setting up Write to learn, we have been very fortunate to have such amazing methodologies like The Writing Revolution® , and resources like the Reading Science in Schools (RSiS) Syntax Scope and Sequence. We have utilised this work to create our adapted version of the scope and sequence based on RSiS. There are separate columns for concepts to teach, and skills to teach at the sentence and then paragraph and composition levels. Punctuation is also taught, embedded within the other strategies.

We have also developed a clear Write to Learn template (based on an appositives lesson) with all lesson components aligning to Explicit Instruction, somewhat bulletproofing the work of all the year levels on writing this year. The building blocks for this template came from some amazing work by Brad Nguyen and James Dobson last year. While we encourage teams to use it, not all components of the lesson are needed every time, and we have been providing strategic support to help our teachers get used to this new format.

Our clear **Write to Learn template** (based on an appositives lesson) with all lesson components aligning to Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI)

Writing Progress so far

In 2021, a few of our teams at my school started dabbling in The Writing Revolution, some working much further along than others. Apart from this, implementing The Writing Revolution® was relatively new, but we have been encouraged by the excellent feedback from teachers and students.

The challenges we have had so far with this transition have included:

teacher’s understanding the grammar behind the strategies they are teaching (e.g. subject predicate, difference between appositives and relative clauses, clause structure with subordinating conjunctions)
workload involved in getting these lessons planned in the detail we would like

As a school, we are working to support our teachers to develop their professional knowledge about writing and grammar, as well as the people power to get these lessons planned and delivered. By next year, we will have completed much of this grunt work to create the main parts of the lessons. This will mean we can simply deliver these resources year on year, save for a few changes of content and examples.

We are seeing fantastic writing already, but we cannot wait to see how this translates into our performance on the comparative judgement tasks this term, as we shape up our student performance compared to other schools in Australia.

Write to learn in the Cognitorium

For the Foundation students, in my classroom, the Cognitorium, we are aiming to start students off on their own composition of sentences (orally first). We will then build them up to short paragraphs, and eventually whole pieces. Right now, at the beginning, we are starting with repeating phrases and sentences, counting words and hearing word boundaries, and also filling in missing words (aka. sentence completion using pictures).

The whole purpose of Write to Learn is to help students express themselves through writing. Thus we spend time supporting students to craft their own original sentences orally first, until their transcription (handwriting and spelling) is robust enough to write sentences with support. Here are the first few goals for this term.

Concept development (grammar)

• Repeat phrases and sentences (orally)

• Count/clap words in sentences (orally)

Skill Development (Sentence Construction)

• Sentence completion tasks (orally)

• Ask and answer questions using simple sentences (orally)

See the attached slides with our first two lessons of Write to Learn for Foundation students in the Cognitorium.

Things to consider

We know it will not be easy to completely overturn our approach to writing, and we don’t expect this work to be done in one year. We do hope, however, that much of what our teams do now will be ready to teach again next year, with a few small refinements (especially since we are following a scope and sequence, and using a consistent lesson format).

Knowledge of how these language structures work is critical. Check out the following books if you need more expertise in your setting to get your head around the linguistics of teaching writing:

The Writing Revolution®
Lyn Stone’s Language for Life
William Van Cleave’s Writing Matters

Express interest in write to learn materials

more freebies

This cheat sheet about the grammar is absolute gold, put together by my extremely talented colleague, Alana Semerjian, also a teacher at Brandon Park Primary.
I came across this guide to academic writing that also is very handy, especially for secondary teachers by @mrsbgteach

Thanks for visiting, and see you next week!

ABOUT ME

Dr Nathaniel Swain

I am a Teacher, Instructional Coach, Researcher and Writer. I am passionate about language, literacy and learning, and effective and engaging teaching for all students.

Teaching young writers to wield their language