Writing as part of a collaborative team

Once we'd established the needs of the children within our learning team, we put children into different groups to target their needs.
Extension writing:Mel
The children that need extending work with Mel in Room 7. Mel is able to push these children and has been working on editing skills and crafting a piece of work. All of these children have been identified as being at and above the national standard.
Middle writers: Sophie and John
We are working with the children that are just below or at the National Standard. We take turns leading the writing sessions on a weekly basis. The group starts together on the mat for the shared writing part of the lesson. This is where we share learning intentions, motivate the children and model. We then split into two groups for the independent writing part.

A page from Sophie's modelling book

Pages from John's modelling book

Target writing group: Fiona

These children are well below the national standard. Fiona has been doing experience based writing with these children with lots of scaffolding. This group is not doing genre writing yet as their needs are building up vocabulary and confidence levels. This group has a teacher aide to assist.

We are finding that the different groups are running well. All teachers follow the same system of modelling, motivating and setting goals. It is great that we are able to extend writers in the top group as in the past this hasn't been possible. Having four teachers in the team means that we can utilise these groupings to best target the needs of the children.This term we decided to keep our same groups so that we have sound evidence for reporting to parents. We will look at moving the teachers to different groups in Term 3. This will give the children and teachers fresh perspectives.

Next Steps: Reporting to parents.

We need to think carefully about how we can report to parents in a consistent way as the children we teach are not necessarily in our home class. We will write report comments for our writing group but the home teachers need to be well informed so that they convey the right messages to parents.