Neil Mckay - writing course

Last term Sarah and myself attended a course hosted by Neil Mckay at Seven Oaks School. He was a motivated speaker who started the morning session off by modelling with two groups of junior children. He scaffolded the tasks into easy steps that you could use in your own teaching. It was beneficial watching him teach to a group of children and how he could keep them motivation and on task.

Neil Mckay is a strong believer in teaching the process of how to write by using different story plan formats - for examples younger children can use a template for them to record pictures and some words, and the more able children they can use a more complex story plan with pictures and captions. He explained how children can become selective in how they can rework their plan. He also likes to use post-its for initial brainstorms as they can be taking away or grouped for sequencing.

The last part of the morning was spent with an informal discussions on what the group wanted to support their own teaching. We found the course reaffirmed that we am doing some good things at Clearview in own our teaching practices and we will implement some of his visual tips and aspects of his story plans.

Serena has started to use highlighted lines (yellow) to assist children whose writing floats above or below the line and for those children who write large writing. This visual tip instantly made the children's handwriting improve within two writing sessions. He spoke about using TES website and www.primarytexts.co.uk  as a useful link for writing tools as well

It was an enjoyable morning course and Neil Mckay was a good speaker to listen to and believable in his own philosophy and practice.