For the love of writing

 I think the risk we took this year with delaying writing until we had pen grip, letter formation and letter sounds sorted has paid off.

Maybe not in the old National Standards-type sense where we determine a goal of progress that must be met and tells us a perception of what writing should look like at a certain level. What we have achieved is more a passion for writing and we have done this by not adding unnecessary pressure.

What I have noticed is the agency - our tamariki are wanting to write here, there and everywhere. They want to practice - over and over sometimes. They want to write letters, practice each other's names, write strings of letters on the whiteboard, try and spell words and write letters to their whānau. That is a win for me.

We have taken this and built on it, so tamariki are able to write a sentence with support, and with more ease as they can identify some sounds, know how to write the corresponding letter and they also know some high frequency words.

Another thing we have noticed is that the tamariki have moved away from play, and we have had to create another writing space due to high demand!

Where I think we need to head to now is how to structure it so that sentences are completed more independently, and to have some good supporting tools.

We all ready have sentence starter cards and high frequency words on individual tiles that show the tamariki the structure of a basic sentence. We still use the butterfly word cards to sound out words and use blends and diagraphs. We also use this to further cement the high frequency words we have chosen.

I am heading over to Leslee Allen's blog because she has some awesome ideas around structured literacy with regard to writing and the use of phonics. This will form the basis of my ideas around where we head for the rest of the term.