This week we plan to ask the children to write a story of either the ‘Gingerbread Man’ or ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. We have practised saying these stories with actions and making story maps of them too. We want to find out if the oral story telling and visual story maps will support the children’s use of story language and story structure when it comes to writing a story.
Eesah’s story map and story writing….
“Once upon a time.”
Alisa’s story map and story writing….
“Once upon a time there was a little….”
Inayah’s story map and story writing….
Inayah read her writing “Once upon a time an old lady cooked a ‘Gingerbread Man’. The fox ate the ‘Gingerbread Man’.”
Sana’s story map and story writing….
Sana said “Once upon a time a lady cook a ‘Gingerbread Man’. You can’t catch me I’m the ‘Gingerbread Man’. The fox ate him up.”
This week to follow on from verbally telling the story of ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ we have set the children the task of drawing a story map from their memory. We wanted to find out if the children could record the story visually having been able to say it orally.
This week we have looked further at some of the research ideas we wanted to find out more about.
Last week, we were really interested in Pie Corbet’s philosophy that ‘you can’t write it if you haven’t said it and you can’t say it if you haven’t heard it’. We found out that one of his suggestions is to learn a story, say it over and over using actions at the same time to really internalise the story. So we decided to have a go at learning a story that we could recite with actions. We chose ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’! We first listened to the story and then watched the author Michael Rosen reciting the story and showing us some actions.
This is what we looked at with the children…
We spoke to some children, of different abilities, and asked them to retell the story that they had just heard, below are the videos.
The first child is a confident speaker and writer and the second is a child that struggles to generate her own sentences independently and a less confident writer.
(Add video)
We have also spent time this week researching spelling strategies,
During our research on writing we came across Gentry’s 5 spelling stages,
1.Pre-communicative: Begin to know symbols represent meaning, uses a mixture on upper and lower case letters in writing, no spacing, often write some letters from own name.
2. Semi- Phonetic: Begin to understand letters have sounds, begin to form letters, occasionally writing letters wrong way round.
3. Phonetic: spelling mirrors sound, spaces are used between words, good understanding of correctly formed letters,
4.Transitional: vowels used in every syllable, can recall words and spell new words, sounds out words using different strategies.
5. Correct: Basic knowledge of English spelling
After reading through his research we could see where the gap lies in our target children and it’s showing some evidence of stage 5 Phonetic and working towards stage 4 Transitional.
Phonetic stage is where the following can be seen in the child’s work.
• Spelling tends to mirror sound.
• Often try and sound out words everything they spell.
• Writing is easier to interpret (word spacing is observed, understanding of directionality)
• Fairly good link between letter and sound.
Transitional is where they need to show the following in their writing.
• Follows basic accepted patterns of English spelling.
• Vowels are used in every syllable.
• The writer can make a good attempt to recall words and to spell new words.
• Strategies tend to depend on sounding out words.
The last one is key as these strategies put weight on the sounding out. This is where we are finding that some children who we have targeted are at the stage where they are not independently sounding out aloud and in fact they seem to wait and watch for the teacher to sound out the words rather then to attempt themselves.
The following link is a very good test you can try. It’s trying to match Gentry’s 5 spelling stages with it’s matching description.
