English Developmental Continuum P–10 – Writing
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Conventions of Writing Scaffolding learning from 1.25
Indicators of Progress
- Students use basic sentence structures and vary sentence beginnings. They write sentences that contain at least two ideas and are sequenced appropriately, with the subject, verb and object used correctly.
- Students begin to use a range of simple ending punctuation such as full stops. They use capitals at the beginning of sentences and write "I" using a capital.
- Students begin to use simple conjunctions (and, but) to join ideas, data, reasons or opinions.
Teaching Strategies
The learning and teaching approach for writing is illustrated for students responding within the context of Mini-beasts.
Revising phase
Practising to integrate aspects of fine motor coordination
Students practise integrating or combining the aspects of motor coordination that lead to legible writing. For example:
- practise effective hand movements such as pencil grip and hand positioning on a keyboard and gradually refine their pencil grip to get fluency in letter formation
- practise body posturing and arm movements and positioning of the paper or key board
- practise improving formation of letter patterns, by using self-talk to guide their motor activity
- plan how they will write particular letter clusters before writing them
- Say how they can improve the legibility at their writing
- learn strategies for copying sentences (one or a few at a time)
- they learn to vocalise each sentence before beginning to write and rehearse it.
They also learn use of the keyboard more successfully.