So what now

 With the advent of phonics, in our case BSLA,  there have been loads of questions around readiness for writing. Some schools of thought still support jumping in from the start of school, while others argue that if tamariki have no sounds/formation to work with, why do we start formal writing straight off.

I have explored all these ideas in my class. For the last two years we have tried to build in essential words and at least the first two sets of sounds before we started daily, formal writing in books in term 3. And it did work really well because the foundations were solid, and it took some of the pressure off writing sentences if tamariki had some established skills all ready.

This year, I thought, shall I start formal writing from the outset? Because truthfully, with the tamariki coming in with little to no alphabet/phonics knowledge, I knew I would be the scribe, and would be modelling the writing process anyway.

I thought I would use colourful semantics to support because this was a way of building language and understanding of what a basic sentence structure involved.

I also developed the Heidi Songs rubric to capture progress.

And... whether I started earlier, or later in the year, there was actually not a great deal of difference in outcomes, except my three top girls are trying hard to write two sentences independently.

There has been progress across the board in varying degrees for all tamariki, so it still leaves me with questions for next year.  And that is still the age old question of developmental readiness.