Hello everyone,
As we are really pressing on with our writing I thought a blog post would be useful to show you how we teach writing and what you might expect to see from your own child!
'Children will surprise you... but only if you let them.'
Firstly, a big thank you to everyone that has been so supportive of the new morning structure. Writing is a massive skill for all children and we feel that the more practice children get, the better they will get at something.
Of course, with the new structure we want children to feel like they can challenging themselves - you may have seen 'The Dip' picture of the whiteboard. We share regularly with the children that you should be wanting to head into that dip - because the best learning happens in there. The different writing activities that are in the purple trays in the morning represent a progression of challenge from Blue, Yellow, Green & Red. So see if you can have a go at some different ones. However, we do also make it clear to the children that we will never 'Tell them' to do a more challenging one. We will encourage and support, but it is ultimately their choice as to whether they do or not. 9 times out of 10, they will!
Anyway, onwards! We teach children to write using the different sounds that we have taught them. At the moment children do not know all of the ways to spell things simply because we haven't taught them all the different spellings of sounds yet! So the sounds and letters that they think spell things may be different from the actual spelling of words. For example, 'ice cream' could be spelt 'ighs creem'. And this is absolutely fine for the age of children in the reception class. I also say could because children have a wonderful way of spelling things sometimes. Obviously we want to get to children spelling these words correctly, but this will come in time with more phonics teaching. What we want to enable children to do at the moment is write the words that they want to write independently. The important thing here is that we are not spelling words out to children. This will give them an opportunity to develop their own, independent writing.
We always encourage children to use a range of tools that are always available in the classroom:
- Sounding words out - this is the children themselves listening to word and hearing the sounds within it. The word 'bag' for example is made up of 'b-a-g' This gets more complicated with longer words. Some children will also be getting familiar with the idea of 'Fred Talking' their words - more to follow on this in another post.
- Sound mats - found in the classroom at any time of the day!
- Tricky word butterflies - these are currently on the end of one of the storage units
- Frieze boards currently displayed on the window panes and door!
Scattered throughout the post are some examples of what writing could look like, but each child's can look different! I apologise that I cannot get the pictures ant bigger! In all of these instances, the children have been encouraged to sound words out and use any tools they wish to. I promise you that EVERY child is capable of this given the time and inclination.
In parents evenings we will be talking more about this and I will of course answer any questions you may have!
Reception team
