Recommended Reading
Problems with writing within the Literacy Syllabus at this stage, particularly writing of any length, is often a major difficulty with some children. This can derive from a perceived poor imagination, difficulties in the classroom, poor grammatical skills to finding the actual process of writing laborious. Sometimes a number of these factors are involved but often the child is particularly poor at one specific type of writing, for example narrative. One to one Tutorials can help here.
All sorts of triggers and prompts are useful. With simple report writing, an invented stage by stage commentary can be encouraged by linking the subject to a sport or activity that the child enjoys, say football or rounders or the guided recollection of an exciting school outing.
With narrative work, the example of reading with the child just before the writing task from an inspiring children's book can prompt an invented paragraph showing what a particular character could do next. Alternatively, a new character can be invented on the pattern of one in the book and a situation suggested to encourage a paragraph or two of text, depending on the child's age. Various templates for story structures are given in schools and found in the many Key Stage 2 primers that are published; these are ideal for close study in one to one tutorials. The old chestnut of providing an interesting first line for a story that the pupil then goes on to complete also often works well as a prompt.
Where the particular difficulty is with manually producing the writing children can often write much more fluently word processing a text on the computer; the sight of the sentences appearing professionally gives them confidence and the words can then begin to flow. Spell checking will of course, help here. Alternatively, handwriting practice using simple copying can improve matters with some children as can focusing on letter formation.
Poor imagination in a child can be exaggerated - often by the child themselves! Imagination in composition can be encouraged in a number of ways and poetry is one of the main ones. If children read a short poem with strong rhythm that they like, they can paraphrase or extend it themselves . The rhythm (and the rhyme) providing a spur to their imagination and invention. There are a number of anthologies of children's verse and the one that I find particularly useful is 'The Puffin Bookof 20th Century Verse'. It is packed with a variety of historical and more contemporary children's poems of different styles and lengths.
Malcolm Love
March 2011.
