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Supporting your child's Writing

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Learning Literacy at Home

VOICES Menus

Remember..

· Celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities

· Focus on the positives and one goal

· Acknowledge the effort that leads to learning

· Give choices of next steps when your child is in productive struggle

· Reflect on the writing with a strengths based approach eg 'Wow I like the way you...'

Open choice writing

Allow your child to draw, label and write about their ideas, thoughts and thinking in a scrap book or pages collated into a book. These can then be formed into seeds (ideas) as they could be drafts or drafted into spectacular writing pieces once further develop. Or they may be some great authentic pieces of writing with purpose and audience in mind.

A few ideas:

Draw/ write about your favourite past time; (this could be a persuasive piece)
Draw/write about your experiences whilst learning from home
Write for an authentic purpose and audience in ind for example ,create a letter, card, email or postcard to a family member, neighbour or teacher

Writer's identity- What type of writer are you?

Have a conversation with your child and ask the following questions..

What do you consider your personal strengths as a writer? What are your challenges?

When has writing been a pleasing, positive or important experience for you?
What do you like to write about most in open choice writing?
When are you most compelled to write?
When have you seen writing move others emotionally- maybe they laughed or cried?
What have been some tough times in writing for you? Times you felt a it uneasy in writing, what could you do to help you?

VOICES MenUS

Please be aware that the VOICES menu as skills and strategies that can support your writing. They are a tool to support writers finding that next step and when reflecting on how to further enhance their writing.

You may to ask your child to read their writing and explain their illustrations to you then

What VOICES strategy are you working towards today as a writer?
How is it going?
What have you been doing to make your writing strong?
You did something that good writers do________!
Good writers do______ and you did that right here.
I can see that you have utilised _______ and _____________________ VOICES strategy.
What other strategy could you use to make your writing even stronger?

How to support your BEGINNING writer

Start with a positive. ' Wow I love the way you drew a picture of the girl, I wonder if we could add some more details to er outfit, what might she be wearing?'
Find an authentic purpose or reason to write. For example 'Who would you like this picture to be for? Perhaps you could draw a picture and write about it and send it to your aunty or teacher?
Encourage your child to draw in great detail before writing. This will then provide detail in their writing with the use of adjectives. For example from 'This is a car' to 'This is a red car with big, black wheels. There is smoke coming out of the motor because it is broken',
Engage your child in various fine motor tasks prior to writing to help them warm up their finger muscles and improve their fine motor skills. Some example may be; playing with play dough, beading, cutting, pasting and colouring. This will help them gain strength in their fingers leading to more precise formation and increased writing stamina.
Allow them to use their Magic words for support when they are beginning to write a sentence and ask them to sound out the other words.
When sounding out words there may be letters that are silent or they may be spelling patterns or rules. Please keep in mind that at this stage they may make 'plausible' attempts at spelling words for example 'bekoz for because'.

How to support your proficient writer

Ask your child to read their writing to you:

Look at the VOICES Menu to provide

Feedback:

I can see that you did what good writer's do by using the strategy .....

Wow.. I like the way you....

The way you wrote... was really great, it made me feel...

Feedforward:

How have you applied your VOICES writing goal? Can you show me where?

What is your next step for your writing? (Look together at the VOICES Menu)

How will this make your writing even stronger?

Can I give you a handy hint....?

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