Writing Progressions

Below is what is stated in the Literacy Progressions for The First Year of School. I feel we are doing a good job of teaching writing and our we seem to be following the progression below pretty well. I'm not sure that our students really understand the purposes for their writing so perhaps this is something to talk about more, particularly with our more advanced writers.

"At first, there is a high level of scaffolding as teachers help students to:

• hold an idea in their head long enough to write it down
• say, hear, and record the predominant sounds in the words they want to write
• write from left to right and leave spaces between words
• form letters accurately.

Gradually, the support alters as teachers help students to build and strengthen their processing systems and to create longer, more complex texts. Students learn to:

Studies of effective teachers have shown that they continually make explicit the connections between reading and writing. Teachers who have a grasp of this reciprocal relationship recognise that writing is neither secondary to reading nor something to be taught separately from reading.

Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4, page 113

• experiment with capturing words from their oral vocabulary
• hear and say the initial and final sounds and some dominant medial sounds in the words they want to write
• recognise and identify common sounds in different words
• use their developing visual memory to consistently encode (spell) some known words correctly
• make close attempts to encode words by using their developing knowledge of phoneme–grapheme relationships, which enables them to:
  • understand that words are made up of sounds and that sounds are written with letters
  • write all consonant sounds, and represent some vowel sounds, in at least one way
  • attempt to record the sounds within words in sequence
• make close attempts to encode words by noticing visual similarities to known words
• attempt to use capital letters and full stops as they develop their understanding of sentences
• reread what they write as they are writing and read (or retell) their writing to themselves and others.

Students in the first year of school are becoming increasingly aware of the purposes for their writing, and they use a range of text forms. They can express their ideas in increasingly interesting ways as they gain control over using more complex language structures, including varied ways of beginning sentences."

http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions/The-first-year?q=node/11