In literacy we have been writing warning stories, using a template (The Canal by Pie Corbett) changed to include Alan Peat’s sentence types. This has been a little bit arduous as we ended up ‘boxing up’ the story a paragraph at a time before writing that paragraph. They found it quite hard at first to ‘modify’ the example to fit the new storyline.

As part of the writing process I have been trying to develop effective peer to peer feedback, giving them specific things to look for and comment on. Although the feedback is improving, the children are still not critical enough in their reading of each other’s writing. They still miss basic punctuation and grammatical errors which they spot easily when doing the same task in a whole class situation. I aim to carry on working on this, training them to look for, and feed back, on specific things.

I also wanted to level this writing to give me information for my Autumn 2 O-track levels. Therefore, I wanted the children to work on their own, and each others, writing without very much imput/feedback from myself at this stage.

Now they have finished their drafts, I have marked their work using our marking policy. There job now is to re-draft their work, this time using the Chromebooks and Google Docs. This is the first time I have done this and so far, very impressed by it. Being able to add comments onto their writing in real time is fantastic. As they address the things I say, we can tick the ‘resolved’ box by the comment! See the picture below for a screen shot. I will update you, with some finished examples, when the project is complete.

Steve