Our inquiry meeting used team work by a group of colleagues to offer solutions to a class problem. My problem is the reluctant writers who have good ideas to share, can put their ideas into a sentence orally, are capable of using their alphabet sound knowledge to attempt to write unknown words and can hear sounds in the correct sequence but are still reluctant to "talk to the paper".
These children are not reluctant readers but do find the physical task of writing and forming letters daunting. For them writing is a laborious task and I have tried different ways to encourage them such as
-shared writing where I write some of the tricky part.
- giving them a free choice of topic to write on so they did not feel constrained by what they could write about.
-making up digital word banks so they were not constrained by lack of vocabulary or spelling.
- aiming for quality not quantity. One well written sentence was better than four "formula" (I went to ... and I went ... ) sentences.
-using typing so that they weren't held up by their struggle to physically write a sentence.
-drawing a picture to organise their ideas.
One suggestion was to make the writing shared with a live audience, not just the teacher, so they could see a purpose of the writing. They were telling their friends of their experience. This may be recorded or videoed so their ideas are already formed into sentences and they can refer back to it when necessary and let them concentrate on how letters are formed.
Using typing does seem to the best solution so far as it helps overcome the main barrier of writing being a hard physical tasks. It is quicker, gets the job done, it is more legible than "spider" writing and the student can feel a sense of achievement.
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