"Look in your heart and write"

Writing is one of my passions and I am always looking at ways that I can inspire and motivate the students in my class, ways that will accelerate their writing and grow their enthusiasm for writing.  One aspect that I have struggled with in my class, is imagination.  How could I get the students to think more creatively  and build their imaginations.

I came across this video on you tube that I really liked. In this video it talked about how the teacher integrates writing into everything on a daily basis. Some of the other key points that I found useful in this video were:

• Students keep a writers notebook where they can brainstorm and raft ideas which they can then share with the class. 
• Giving the children the opportunity to share their writing and gain confidence in wanting to share their writing with others. 
• Giving children the opportunity to give feedback and feed forward on their peers writing. 
• Work shopping allows children to be able to give and receive feedback effectively. 
• Talking about what really good writers do. The use of mentored text or exemplars to inspire and motivate children in their writing. 
• Using books that have really good language such as vivid verbs to inspire children in their writing. 
• Follow up: Small group explicit instructions giving teacher an opportunity to access weather the children understood the content that she was teaching as a whole class eg: Vivid verbs. 
• Varying lessons: Whole class, groups and individual lessons. 
• Success with writing means creating a respectful community of writers: Teacher listening to the students concerns, that the students know that the teacher is there to help them and that we are there to help each other, that we are all learning together: teacher learning from students and vice versa.  

What I really enjoyed the most about this video is when it said that "Teachers need to see themselves as writers too." I think this is very significant. As I love to write, I am always sharing my writing with the children in my class as well as modelling this with my class.  I also show children writing that I can edited, so they can see that a good writer always goes back and re-reads their stories and edits and makes changes where needed to make their writing more powerful and paint a picture in the readers minds. 

Teacher strategies were underpinned by knowing their learners. This doesn’t just mean knowing what they can and can’t do when they write, but what appeals to them, what interests they have, experiences they like to talk about, etc. When these were factored in their learning activities, children were engaged, more confident, and skill development came with the increased mileage and motivation.

I feel this is important. In my classroom I have used realistic context that children can relate to in their writing and writing about what interests them. This keeps the children engaged and motivated. Because my class had a mix of Maori and Pacifica background, I found that the children really enjoyed writing about themselves and their cultures.  Writing was also purposeful and meaningful to the students. 

My classroom was a 1:1 net book class as everything was done digitally. I looked at the different tools that I could use in regards to technology and how I could implement this in writing. 

Some tools that I came up with that I found were very successful.

• Using story bird to create pieces of poetry, or story book or chapter book on artwork chosen by them. 
• Using picture prompts as a visual representation where the children can go just about anywhere in their imagination using that picture prompt. 
• Using Socrative where children could work collaboratively with each other in their writing.  
• Story maker -This is an interactive tool where the students are able to add characters, backgrounds etc to create their story. 

I am always learning and always looking at new ways of how I can teach creative writing to my students that are engaging and that inspires them and forms their imaginations to grow. I look forward to talking to more teachers as well as researching and professional development on this topic.

I found that growing up I always used to love to write. My ideas would always come from everywhere, from what I felt to what I saw etc that I needed to carry my idea book (thought journal)every where with me. I am really looking forward to implementing this though journal in my class-with the children that I will be working with in 2017. Once the children get into the habit of writing everyday, then their imaginations will keep growing.

I write to live, and live to write....

GTS: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 Today we had a teacher only day at school. We begun the day with school-wide writing moderation. We firstly talked about why moderation is important. We had a moment or two to independently think about that question, then we used a strategy that we use in our classroom's-Peer/shared why we through moderation was important. 
We then as a staff put all out ideas together into a mind map which is included in the photo below. We then went onto TKI and looked at Why we moderate  article and also discussed key points we found were significant to the question. 

Together as a staff we went through the EasTTle marking rubric and looked at the different stages and what the key words were that differentiates each of the stages, so that we had a better understanding. We also looked at the exemplars online as this would also help us in making judgements on the writing moderations. 




We then got into our groups where we worked together to moderate 3 different writing samples from different year groups. This is found was very helpful as we talked together  in regards to coming to an agreement as to why we thought that student was at that level and justifying our scores with reasons. 

Teaching conversations are very important during moderation as we learn from each other. Being a beginning teacher and being able to work alongside and talk to an experienced teacher, you learn a a lot improving on our curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge. 

It was also interesting to compare the moderation results to our own scores and see the comments of the other teachers and see their views and why they thought the student were not at this level or that level.

I believe that as teachers we are life long learners and these discussions are important in terms of learning from each other through collaborative discussions.