Lightning Writing

Just like anything else, one of the key elements of becoming a better writer is actually doing it. One of the strategies we have used to increase the frequency of our writing is something we have called 'Lightning Writing'. This takes place most mornings during registration and involves writing for a short amount of time (often only 15 minutes). In general, the writing tasks fall into the following areas:

• three sentence stories - write a story in three sentences. Horror works well, but it can also be a good opportunity for teaching rhetorical questions as a story ending.
• improving supplied sentences - give them basic sentences and get pupils to improve them.
• sentence combining - a variation on the above. However, with a focus on joining simple sentences together.
• teaching sentence types in a context - we use Alan Peat 'Exciting Sentences'. This is a great opportunity to teach some of the different styles.
• descriptive passages - writing a description based on a stimulus such as those provided by the brilliant 'Pobble' website. Although we have used our own such as this one.
    
  There are, of course,  lots of other options. We wrote tweets, emails to the prime minister and even letters of complaint. 

Once the idea is set up, the task is displayed on the board and children were able to get on with having a go independently. 
This activity does require a bit of extra marking, but, by adding in a peer-assessment day, editing day and feedback day, one task can become an extremely constructive piece of writing over a whole week. Often these tasks are so good they can be published (including sending them to the people they are writing to). Another advantage is that they come so frequently you can get them to write what interests you and the children as well as those pieces on the curriculum. A favourite of ours was the writing of haiku, which ended up in our best work books at the end of the year.

More Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences.

We are now trying the next step in our use of dice to support children in their use of Alan Peat 'Exciting Sentences'.

With the Year Six class we work with, we are giving the children, who have all been taught different sentence types over the last three years, a blank cube net as might be found here. The children, who are writing mystery narratives, are going to choose the most relevant and useful sentence types for their piece of writing, The challenge will be to take two dice and merge the two different sentence types into one wonderful sentence of complexity and detail (instead of appsmashing; sentencesmashing).

Whilst we love the way 'exciting sentences' serves as a toolbox for equipping children with different ways of adding sentence structures and punctuation, the ultimate aim is for children to develop a proper understanding of how those sentence structures and different pieces of punctuation work. Then we want them to effectively and appropriately 'break the rules' in order to make their writing more effective.

The purpose of this intermediate stage is to get the children to take a proactive role in choosing which sentence types work best for the text type they are writing and, more importantly, how they go beyond their basic use in making them more effective. For those writers who are confident, we now want to teach them to take risks with their writing and start deliberately breaking rules, from a basis of knowledge, in order to engage the reader.

The children found that some sentences worked more effectively than others. For example an 'if, if, if, then' sentence worked well with 'simile' sentences. It made them think even harder about the effect the words were having on the reader especially when the sentences went wrong. It also demonstrated those children who were learning the sentence types parrot fashion and needed some grammar and punctuation intervention as well as those who had a deeper understanding.

To get started with the 'exciting sentence' types, buy the book here.

Finding Sentences Structures

Earlier this year, whilst on a school trip to the National Space Centre, a colleague and I were reading some information when she exclaimed, "Ah, nice embedded clause there". This then developed through the rest of the day with us trying to spot types of sentences we'd not seen so far that day. Some of the children even got involved. In fact, for one of them, it meant she read a whole lot more than she probably would have done otherwise! 

As a result, I decided to do more of finding sentence structures within texts to look at how and why they've been used...

1. Authorial Intent
During reading activities (guided, group, class, one-to-one and so on...), look for sentence structure variety. Discuss what sentence structures have been used and why the author has chosen to use them. Do they stick to a certain type? Do they have large variety? Does the child(ren) know and use those sentences?

2. Write Sentences Into a Story

When I read Alan Peat's 'A Second Book of Exciting Sentences', I found in it a story called 'The Minotaur’s Revenge’. This story contained in it examples of the sentences from both of Alan Peats' books about sentence types. My class read this story (enjoying it) and found many of the sentence types we'd been learning to use. As a result, I had a go at my own story (just using the sentences from 'Writing Exciting Sentences: Age 7 Plus') and that story can be found here (Also, answer key). Again, my class enjoyed reading the story (whilst agreeing I shouldn't give up the day job) and the challenge of finding the sentence types. I was very clear that this was a contrived exercise and I was not suggesting or expecting that their story writing should reflect this example of including a group of sentences in a text. In addition, I included a couple of sentences that showed how the rules taught when learning these sentences can be tweaked and adapted, which lead to a interesting discussion. A text example (fiction or non-fiction) could be written as an exemplar for something being studied and then include relevant sentence structures. 

3. Sentence Structure Booklets 
Each week, our children write down words that are new to them and find out their definitions. Following on from this, I created a booklet for children to use during reading time (at home and in school) to write down the sentence structures they come across as they read. A copy of this booklet can be found here. And, for those using Alan Peat's 'Writing Exciting Sentences: Age 7 Plus', this (select pages that are useful to your children, don't just print off the whole lot) and this may be of use.

4. Sentence of the Week 
Some easier than others but, if you have a Sentence of the Week: "Can anyone find an example of that in a book"

After children have found a number of sentences in published work, can they identify any particular sentence structures that fit a fiction and non-fiction and then genres? The main area of discussion, and the largest section in the booklets I gave the children to use, is authorial intent. Why is the sentence used? What's the impact?

Some of the ideas outline above have been done with Alan Peat's own advice about using his work and his blog post 'Exciting Sentences – a word of caution' in mind. The ideas and resources shared here do not contradict that advice in the way they were delivered.

'We Make Use of...' Alan Peat

Our next post in our 'We Make Use of...' series...

A number of colleagues have been lucky enough to attend training run by Alan Peat. Below are the books* I currently have at my disposal in my classroom. These books, the information brought back from the training and our adoption of a whole-school approach to English coverage has transformed my teaching of English and in turn the children's attainment an application (across the curriculum) of rules of written English.

In addition to those books, at the time of writing, I have the following apps* installed (indicated by 'Downloaded') on my iPad device:

Whole school - The first message that came back from the training was for us to use a whole school approach: share vocabulary, tools, displays, diagrams and so on. These were mostly from Alan's training, but in staff meetings, we also generated vocabulary and resources we wanted to us.

Punctuation - Alan's book was purchased for each class. As a result, every teacher had at their disposal a book that gave informative and useful information about each punctuations type and how children could be taught how to use them.

Sentence Types - As with the punctuation book, 'Writing Exciting Sentences: Age 7 Plus' was also purchased for each class. Again, teachers now had a method of helping children to improve the variety of sentence structures used in their writing. We looked at which sentences could be introduced in each year group and the accompanying app helped us know with which text types to use the sentences.

Language - Throughout the training, books and apps (as mentioned before), the main factor in helping children to improve their writing ability has been through shared and consistent vocabulary that children can hear again and again and become increasingly familiar with.

Apps / books at home - We've shared the apps and books with parents to allow them to reinforce this learning outside of the classroom. 

These are just our experiences and it's been very positive. There's much more Alan offers on his site and through his training. See alanpeat.com for more details.

*Some of these books / apps were purchased by the school we work at, others by us personally and some provided free of charge by Alan Peat Ltd. None of those were for the purpose or expectation of this blog post being written. This is, as always, the view and opinion of two full-time class teachers about something we use in the classroom. 

Apps for Your Primary Classroom XII

Our 12th post about apps we've made use of, that others may like to try too. The other posts can be found here.

 Image credit: www.apple.com

ENGLISH

7 Little Words
Count Words and Characters  *
Creative Writer  *
Fairytales Story Machine
Lettercraft - A Word Game
Lists for Writers  *  
Mematic  *

PhotoFunia
SpellFix
TypeDrawing  *  
Word-Juice

GENERAL
Curved Text
Explain Everything
PartySnapper 
Printer Pro 
Reverser
Scanner Translator Free
Spark Camera  * 

MATHS 
DivisionFlow

FlowPlus

Math Shake
MultiFlow
TEN SUM

SCIENCE
ID Weeds
mySoil

* These apps are included here after reading about suggestions for their use in '50+ iPad Lessons for Exciting Sentences' by Alan Peat and Lee Parkinson. Having used this book in our school, we happily recommend it. In the book, it gives detailed, interesting and innovative ideas for using the apps above and more in the classroom. Our classes have enjoyed these activities and improved their writing attainment as a result of its purchase.

Image credit: www.alanpeat.com

More Display Interactivity

This post is a follow up to our post almost exactly three years ago. Since that post about interactive displays, we added Word of the Week in 2012 and we've now added to it further… 

In October, we wrote about #PadletBombing. That blog post came from an idea inspired by Robin Smith. Robin, you're responsible for this one too…

The Padlet Bombing came about from Robin's class working on different sentence types on a weekly basis and using Padlet as a place to share their work. This got us thinking: 'A sentence per week? What could we do with that?'

So, the interactive display has been added to:

We use the Writing Exciting Sentences book (and associated apps) by Alan Peat to aid our teaching of sentence and punctuation variety. The sentence type for the week and examples used on the display come from the book and app. Children can write their own example of the sentence type and then stick it onto the display. We are using a sentence type that links to the text type being taught that week and ask children to write their example as one that could be used in our writing for that text type. 

In addition, we also came across this yesterday:

@alanpeat @Infeducation Our sentence of the week (2A), using an image from #LMYL. pic.twitter.com/uGhKHpRMla
— Tamber7 (@roberts418) November 5, 2014

You may like a separate section for your interactivity or add it to a Working Wall. 

Padlet Bombing

Collaboration and working online is great, engaging and enjoyable. Last week, Robin Smith shared with the world the Padlet wall his class were going to be working on during their lesson. I clicked his link and up came the Padlet wall. Thought nothing more off it, until...

 

Image credit: padlet.com

... the next day. A child asked me a question and we were about to use the internet on my teacher iPad device to access the internet, when up came the last site I looked at. Yep, you guessed it: Robin's Padlet wall. So, what did I do? We passed the iPad device around my classroom, reading his childrens' work (as they wrote) and adding some ideas of our own.

I then Tweeted Robin saying that I hoped he didn't mind my "gatecrashing". He replied, coining the phrase, "Padlet Bombing".

I realised in advance that Robin had been looking for collaboration and wouldn't mind someone joining in. However, anyone sharing an open document online is looking for collaboration, aren't they... 

@RAS1975 Think you invented a new phrase. Like it!
— Liam (@ThisIsLiamM) October 19, 2014

Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences by Text Type

Just over a year ago we posted this. In the past year we've used those dice in our classrooms. The original idea of rolling a dice didn't quite work as any sentence doesn't always work in the context of a piece of writing. We have however used the dice in our lessons more as a 3D reference tool. Children quite like looking at them for inspiration.

In August 2014, Alan Peat contacted us:

@PrimaryIdeas I've RT'd but do you know what I think would work even better - dice with appropriate sentence types for different genres
— Alan Peat (@alanpeat) August 9, 2014

As a result, we've created a set of dice that link to text types.

These dice are based upon the following book: Writing Exciting Sentences The book has been followed up with associated apps. Also a credit to Bryn Goodman, whose advice about which sentences fit each text type was essential.

We hope the dice are useful and thank you again to Alan Peat for his resources.

Create Your Own Interactive Resources

So, the curriculum's changing. Lots has been said, lots has been discussed. Some like; others don't like. Maybe you're a teacher very able when it comes to computational thinking, however you may be less au fait with this aspect of primary education.

We've both got an interest in computing. In recent years, we've run a Code Club and also ensured the coverage of computing in our junior school. 

Our latest development is to begin creating our own games and activities in Scratch to use in our classrooms and others across the school. Creating the resources yourself means they can the tailored to your own needs. Also, if you've got to teach and support children in computational thinking, it's a good idea to develop your own skills. Whilst developing those skills, create something that's useful to you!

Image credit: scratch.mit.edu

We're using Scratch because it's a reasonably easy place to start, projects and easily shared online and others can 'remix' the project to adapt it for their needs or wants. Other languages can of course be used too.

We began by creating this project to support this blog post. This uses Alan Peat resources and if you're using them too, why not remix the project to show the sentences you're wokring on?

Next, we created this project to accompany this blog post.

We're sure they'll be more to come from us. Our Scratch projects can all be found here: http://scratch.mit.edu/users/primaryideas.

Countdown Inspired Literacy Game

Last week, I was working with a group in literacy. Our focus was sentence structure and making our sentences more interesting. Whilst working on whiteboards I come up with the following...

I asked each of the six children for a word or type of punctuation:

"James give me a verb" - jumping

"Oliver, an adjective" - pink

"Sarah a piece of punctuation please" - exclamation mark

"Luke give me a noun" - football

"George, another punctuation" - brackets

"David an adverb please" - quickly

So, I wrote down: 'jumping, pink, !, football, ( ) and quickly' and told the children to write a sentence including all of those.

Some did it easier than others, some found it very tricky and sometimes the sentences were bizarre. They could add anything they wanted to the sentence, but it had to make sense and include everything from the prompt.

Quickly, Adam (who did not like heights) climbed the large daunting tree to retrieve the pink football!

It's like asking for letters or numbers in Countdown. In time, a set of cards with words and punctuation may even be made... 

Here there's a Scratch project to support this game

Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences by Alan Peat

During 2013, we have begun using the Writing Exciting Sentences book by Alan Peat in our classrooms. We have found it to be a very useful resource and would recommend it to anyone who thinks it may be useful. As of May 2014, an accompanying app has been available.

To accompany the resource, we are about to start using dice as one way for children to, sometimes, choose which kind of sentence to write.

Idea 1: Each child has two dice. They roll them and then use this grid to decide which kind of sentence to write:

Idea 2: Cut of these cubes to make dice for the children to roll:

A copy of these documents can be found here.

Also, here's a game we made using Scratch. 

UPDATE - See our our post from 2014 about sentence dice by text type.