In Term 3, the Preps learnt how to write narratives. They began by understanding the structure of a narrative, that stories have a beginning, middle and end, through exploring rich literature. From there, the Preps read decodable texts and learned to retell these stories using picture prompts. Students wrote a sentence for each part of the story, and some chose to write up to 5-6 sentences, demonstrating their ability to self-differentiate their learning. Finally, the Preps used their knowledge of sounds and understanding of stories to create their own narratives from picture prompts. We are excited to share the stories they created independently.
Why are we excited?
- The students use their decoding skills to encode (spell) the words they are writing.
- The students don’t need to copy from the board; they attempt all their writing independently.
- The students are far more conscious of punctuation and sentence structure.
- The students are confident!
What’s new in writing?
The explicit teaching of systematic synthetic phonics has been a cornerstone of our writing instruction. It has made teachers more skilled, increased student engagement and improved writing quality. In our classrooms, during whole-class explicit instruction, students write daily on whiteboards. This has helped explicitly teach sentence structure, punctuation and grammar. Students began by mastering these basics, then moved on to very explicit teaching of narrative structure and then they learnt how to expand their writing ideas.