English Developmental Continuum P–10 – Writing
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Ideas Communicated in Writing scaffolding learning from 1.50
Indicators of Progress
- Students write short texts about personal experiences and familiar ideas that describe, for example, what happened and how the writer felt or was thinking. They logically and correctly sequence the sentences in a story to support the purpose of their text.
- Students express their opinions and support them with reasons or evidence. In this writing they begin to sequence details and comments for persuasive effect, although the links between ideas may not be clear. They begin to state their position in the first sentence, and use simple conjunctions such as and or but to link ideas logically.
- Students describe or explain events, selected phenomena or processes, and instructions or questions. In their writing they begin with a simple definition of the theme or topic, sequence or prioritise ideas and data and finish with a simple review. Students writing begins to include basic data and very simple reasons. They respond to words that question relationships such as why, how, where by using the appropriate terms, for example, they answer when or how questions by using terms such as first, then or next or respond to why? questions by using terms that indicate cause and effect such as because or then.
- Students made at least four ideas in the text and sequence the ideas logically in sentences.
- Students show an awareness of audience through the specific content and language they use; they begin to take account of whether the reader is familiar with the topic of the writing. They begin to reflect on the specific audience for their writing and describe how they will adjust their text accordingly.
- Students use simple analogy or similes based on their experiences to express their meaning.
- Students use more context-specific vocabulary, such as relevant technical terms.
- Students become aware that writing is for different purposes, for example, writing to instruct or teach uses a different form from writing to tell a story, to explain or to describe what was observed. They become aware of a greater range of purposes for writing, for example, a list, a learning log or an invitation.
Teaching Strategies
The learning and teaching approach for writing is illustrated for students responding within the context of Mini-beasts.
Composing phase
Understanding different text types
Students examine what they have written in terms of what they have learnt about different written genres, for example:
- Does their writing teach people about slaters, tell a story about them, explain or describe slaters?
- How is a report about slaters different from a recipe for what slaters eat or a funny story about slaters?