Thursday 28 September 2017

Individual writing assessment

I was caught in two minds here whether to just give the students an open forum to write what they want or to scaffold their writing by using the resources we have become accustomed to. I went with the latter. Students had 30 minutes to use any cards the liked, use the brainstorm map provided, and write their own story. 

These were the results,

Wednesday 20 September 2017

How to write descriptively - Nalo Hopkinson

This afternoon I was fortunate to have this you-tube video shared with me. It made me realise the power of fictional writing, being able to engage all the senses of the reader.

"Cast a spell, that for just a moment you are living in the story".

Tuesday 12 September 2017

Huge Shift

Today I caught one of my targeted students writing independently. For many you may think this is not that great at all. However the background to this had me jumping for joy. We had just a had a speaker from Enroll to vote NZ speak to my learners. There was lots of time for questions and roll plays of what was coming up in the general election. This student was quiet and non-engaged for the majority of the session. Some students asked if they could blog about the experience so they could email the presenter. The picture you can see was published in the Howick Times.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and when i asked to students to create a blog post about a basketball event to had just been to, this student finds the photo of the voting and then proceeds to write down all the important facts he could remember. 
This student has a huge struggle with writing and sometimes will stay home if he knows we will be writing that day. But for me to see this showed me that the work that we have been doing around being a confident writer, and not worrying about making mistakes or being wrong was awesome. 

Monday 4 September 2017

Enjoying being creative

A couple weeks back I worked primarily with my target group of students using "The Game of Awesome" which has been a huge hit. i wanted to prime these guys ready for their assessment at the end of the term. I wanted to see how much of this resource they could use on their own or how much was it teacher input and guidance??? The students performed very well and I was impressed with how much some students wrote that was actually still on topic and not just describing pictures. Some students are now writing with great detail and are able to change their story to include different cards. One student even asked to use more cards than she was allowed to continue writing. This for me was inspiring. 

Please click on the photo to look at the album of submitted work.