There are helpful downloads too, such as a staff wellbeing best practice sheet, a stress buster timetable, a starting again activity and more. Indeed, we can stop focusing on electronic tablets and the future for solutions and instead turn back to the wax tablets of the ancient Romans for some answers! Our pupils can be overloaded when writing paragraphs and full texts, so honing in on playing with sentence variations can help develop the style and substance of their writing in a more manageable way.

Closing the Writing Gap By Alex Quigley (Huntington School Closing the Writing Gap By Alex Quigley (Huntington School

Shortened writing can go unstructured, so even the conscious crafting and modelling of sentences can prove uncommon. Like many teachers my age, I was not taught grammar explicitly at school; or at least, I can’t remember if I was. Paired writing can help get ideas down or collaborative writing is a fantastic way for pupils to achieve and feel proud of their work. Each time they play on a different chess board, in rapid succession, with a different opponent, but in each exam, there is the relentless demand to make their writing moves with speed, skill, and confidence.They say (or often blurt out) something brilliant and then it has faded away either naturally or because someone or something has disrupted the thought process. You may not be functionally illiterate by any measure, but you can still find this task tricky, just as pupils can find writing in the classroom difficult. Jules has particular expertise in inclusive teaching and learning strategies and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia/ADHD. Take some time to consider the experience of a sixteen-year-old pupil sitting something like twenty lengthy examinations.

Closing the Writing Gap | Free Chapter - Routledge

Then, understanding intuitively the nature of a clear and complete sentence, you summarised your reading with a rapid distillation into your own words. Indeed, for many secondary school teachers, reading has always been something that happens ‘naturally’, rather than something to be addressed and taught more explicitly. Take a read of this passage, entitled ‘An Encounter at Sea’, from the 2017 reading comprehension SATs paper.As a result, a gap in grammar knowledge has compromised the teaching of writing and language for a long time. I have used them regularly and find they are great for developing ‘the ear’ for writing and allowing children to learn how to craft sentences.

CLOSE THE WRITING GAP - The Confident Teacher 7 STEPS to CLOSE THE WRITING GAP - The Confident Teacher

The book is accessible and can be helpful as a starting point, but covering so many years of a pupil's school career in so many subjects in about 200 pages is bound to only scratching the surface. Too many adults and young people are unable to perform these seemingly simple acts of daily writing, or to enjoy the potential benefits they offer. The story of writing has rapidly accelerated, with writing quickly becoming an act of near-instant global connectedness.Though many instances of pupils’ writing are in the form of short answers to questions 4 – or note-making, for older pupils in particular – any given school day can include a range of writing types and teacher approaches, from a story or an essay to a short exam answer.