Following our research into the link between writing and communication and language, we have found out that children’s story writing improves when they are able to say their story orally first.
We chose familiar stories and read these with the children, encouraging them to recall and retell the story as a group. They then created a story map to help remember the story all the way to the end. We added actions to this too! The children rehearsed the story in a group and independently to internalise it. This strategy was particularly effective with children who are reluctant to speak out or remember familiar stories.
Once the children felt secure in orally telling the story, we asked them to have a go at writing the story from their memory. The children produced some wonderful pieces of writing that they were able to talk confidently about! They were confident to have a go as they knew already what they wanted to write! The children were extremely enthusiastic and very proud of their achievements.
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.
