Introducing Children As Writers – A Brand New Series
English National Curriculum Writing Resource
In summary, these books and CD-ROMs:
- include 100+ pages of themed writing activities under the headings of FICTION, NON-FICTION, PERSUASION AND PROOFREADING & EDITING
- cover all National Curriculum objectives
- provide support and guidance at each stage of the writing process
- support all abilities through the use of scaffolds
- encourage editing skills to improve writing
- provide ongoing writing assessment opportunities
- include 6 short and 6 long assessment tasks
- offer a variety of audiences and writing purposes
- feature a COLOUR version on CD-ROM
You can view sample pages here.
And order inspection copies for your free 28-day approval here.
HeadStart Primary’s Children As Writers series contains no correct answers, only opportunities.
The intention is to strike a balance between supporting the teacher and providing opportunities for as many open-ended outcomes as possible. The exercises in this book encourage the child to go beyond their own expectations or wildest dreams – and, so often, writing is all about wildest dreams.
In most of the writing topics, there is an incremental movement through word, phrase and sentence work to something longer and more complete: like building a house. This isn’t the same as starting a piece of fiction or non-fiction at the beginning and toiling your way through to the end. That isn’t necessarily what writers do.
Writers start with an idea, a character, a place, a prop, a conversation, a piece of intriguing information, at some point halfway through, or, if they’re lucky, some knowledge of how the story ends.
In this series of books, the writing tasks in the sections on fiction, non-fiction, persuasive writing and proofreading have been organised to follow closely the National Curriculum programme of study for writing skills for key stage one (KS1) and key stage two (KS2).
Without the opportunity to proofread and edit their creative writing, children are unlikely the reflect on the quality or effectiveness of their writing. They do this better – as we all do – if sufficient time has elapsed for them to have enough detachment to read what is on the page, rather than what they meant to put on the page.
This is the reason for including a separate proofreading section, although, as a teacher, you will appreciate how important it is for children to work on their own writing, not just the practice pages provided as part of this series.
This last point is important and relates to the fact that the exercises in this series should not be treated as worksheets in the traditional sense. Ideally, the exercises should be used to provide enough stimulus and scaffolding to guide young writers towards a first draft from their original ideas for writing.
The teacher can then oversee the children’s proofreading and editing, the resulting final version being completed in their writing book.
Examples of completed, edited writing can then be kept as evidence of an individual pupil’s expected standard, level of attainment, strengths and weaknesses, as well as year-on-year progress monitoring.
You can view sample pages here.
And order inspection copies for your free 28-day approval here.
For more information, email us at info@headstartprimary.com, or call us on 01200 423405.
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