Room+12

Vera Gonzales

__ROUND ONE__ This week Vera and I worked on refining her writing programme and improving the quality of her children’s writing. We gave the children specific expectations for editing. The children produced some very high quality writing (with rich vocabulary) during my time and I was impressed with their enthusiasm!

__ROUND TWO __ This time around Vera really wanted me to work closely with a group of her children whom she felt weren't tranferring their knowledge of surface features to their writing. They all have daily phonics and some are in my Switch on to Spelling group, however their great progress during these times of the day were not showing up in their daily writing. We decided to remove the group from the classroom (while Vera had a student teacher) and work with them in the GTR where there would be no interuptions or distractions. Vera was able to observe and take notes while I modeled a variety of strategies and techniques. We looked very closely at the expectations for surface features in relation to the Literacy Learning Progressions and the Standards. I helped the children see the importance ofstriving for accuracy in the editing stages to create a high qulaity finished piece of writing. The importance of checking spelling was reinforced (and expected).

There was huge value in working with a small group of children (7 in total) and being able to conference those children every day. The progress the made during the week was very exciting. Their published efforts can be seen on display in our school Library (and in the photos below).



