Monday, March 14, 2011
Today was a study in contrasts, with one group of year 7 and 8 students flagging and another flying.
Both the class at Russell and the class at Opua are focusing on non-fiction writing. The students at Russell are writing articles about a journey to enter into a School Journal competition. The students at Opua are writing articles about travelling to school safely to offer to the Feet First website. In each case, the article is meant to be short, informative, and engaging.
Both classes have brainstormed ideas, fleshed their ideas out using topic webs, and identified features of non-fiction articles they could use (such as breakouts, sub-headings, and photo captions). By the end of last week, all the students knew what they wanted to write about and had started to plan their non-fiction article.
What with the excitement of participating in Kororakeka Day, many of the Russell students hadn’t really achieved their research goals, though. Everyone completed their topic web this morning, which means that they’ve now done some good scaffolded thinking about about the idea they want to write about.
We’ve also reviewed the physical features of a School Journal article, such as sub-headings, photo captions, labelled diagrams, timelines, and maps.
But I think that we’ve gone too quickly for some students. Combining their initial ideas (from their topic webs) with some typical non-fiction article features (such as sub-headings and labelled diagrams) in a storyboard is simply too challenging without more scaffolded, step-by-step support.
I’m back at Russell School on Wednesday morning, and before then, Eveleen is going to help the students do more research on their topics, help them think further about the ideas we’ve been exploring, and help them further develop their storyboards – and we are going to review our thinking about the next few sessions.
Meanwhile, the year 7 and 8 students at Opua School are working in four very focused writing teams (each of about five students).
As research teams, each team reported back to the whole class on the travelling to school safely message that they are focusing on and the incident they are writing about that highlighted this – and all four teams have decided to write about the same incident and safety issue.
We reminded ourselves of the features of an article on a web page, such as headings and sub-headings, maps with placenames and routes, labelled diagrams, graphs, flow charts, glossaries, click-ons, timelines, break-outs, and captioned photographs. Using copies of articles in the School Journal, the students were able to identify all of these, apart from click-ons.
Using a model on the whiteboard, I then introduced the idea of a storyboard, and the teams created a two- or three-screen storyboard of the article each team is planning to write. Using their storyboards, they divided up the work so that every team member knows the bit(s) they are responsible for writing tomorrow. For example, there are heading and sub-heading writers, “grab-the-reader’s-interest” first paragraph writers, mapmakers, diagram constructors, conclusion writers, and so on. Everyone has several jobs to do.
The students have totally got the idea that we are planning what to write in a very organised way (which is sparking great ideas, in the process).
I’m concerned, though, that we haven’t achieved the same level of understanding and engagement with Eveleen’s students. My instincts tell me though we should spend more pre-writing time on brainstorming, structured planning, and thinking, these kids need to write.
A challenge the Opua students face is the challenge of working in teams. Margaret and I are scaffolding their “putting together of the bits”.
With most of the students writing as individuals (though six in pairs) each Russell student faces a bigger individual writing load (though the competition specifies a maximum of only 500 to 600 words).
Don Long
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