I stumbled across this article and found it to really confirm a lot of my beliefs about teaching writing. Allowing children to write for their own purposes and enjoyment. Not teacher prescribed purposes. The idea that all children initially enjoy "writing" until the become discouraged particularly resonated wth me. All the students in our class are celebrated as "good" writers with something worth while to say. They enjoy writing and never have nothing to write about. I worry that as they move through the school and have to learn "text types" and write to "please the teacher" they will become scared to take risks and find writing pointless. Something that continues to need developing in my practise is giving the student's texts more audience. We try to publish some on the blog but it's still not much. They also read to their peers so I suppose they are having the opportunity to share their writing in that sense also.
https://literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/what-if-almost-everything-we-thought-about-the-teaching-of-writing-was-wrong/
