A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Thursday, 3 March 2016
My tweets on World Book Day about writing
My tweets today about WBD and language:
The most powerful way to help children write is to look at some writing they like and say, 'We can write like that!' #BelieveInTheWriting
Am worried that 1000s of children enjoying stories for #worldbookday and not doing subjunctives. [irony alert]
Am fed up with 'comprehension' where child has to 'explain' (guess) why x or y is 'effective'. = game to know exam formula answer.
We can investigate the patterns of language and try them out ourselves so we 'own' literacy
In my poetry wrkshps I say, 'In this poem, I did x or y. You could do that, change it, or anything that occurred to you.' #LanguagePatterns
We need to learn how good writing works, not invent false criteria and inject them in randomly.
When we investigate the writing we like,we discover it doesn't fit the formula of the 'expected levels' (subordinating conjunctions etc).
LearningObjective: children enthused by some writing today. Tomorrow we try to write like that. Day after: compare.gua: