Year 1 Blue Team - Teaching as Inquiry

Our focus was on writing. After discussions with a number of staff around the school, we wanted to look at the benefits of teaching surface features versus teaching genre. At the time we were predominantly teaching writing through genre.

We identified children in our team who had made minimal progress over the course of the year. These children were put into a target group of 14 children.

We focused on full stops, capital letters, finger spaces and writing multiple sentences. Children wrote a mixture of free choice, experiences and recounts. They wrote on whiteboards during modeling sessions and followed this up in their books. Once a week they had a dictation session to focus on the recording of high frequency words and known spelling patterns without having to generate ideas. These dictation sessions allowed them to write more than when they wrote their own stories. Dictated sentences were engaging and often humourous.

After comparing initial and subsequent samples, we have found that the majority of children are making progress in this group. The engagement of writing has increased and they are focused throughout the writing session. 13/14 children are consistently using finger spaces. All children are starting stories with a capital and ending with a full stop, some are able to identify sentences within their stories. 12/14 children are able to write 3 or more sentences with some assistance.

For the other groups, we do think that genre is a good tool for teaching writing. For emergent and low progress writers we have seen greater progress and engagement through focusing on surface features.