Curriculum Content and Coverage

The Local School Curriculum delivered is based upon the New Zealand Curriculum and is intertwined with our school values.

• Planning should allow for coverage of the range of elements (e-asTTle), at the level of the child as identified by the e-asTTle rubrics.

• Writing should occur as a separate subject daily as well as being integrated across all curriculum areas.

 Programme Emphasis

• Students will learn to write by writing. 

• Learner/ākonga write best when they write about their own experiences. 

• Writing will involve regular modelling, teaching times and individual independent writing opportunities.

• Learner/ākonga will be encouraged to be writers to both share information and ideas in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes.

• Talking, reading and writing are integral and interlinked parts of the writing process.

• Learner/ākonga will be clear about the purpose for writing and who their audience will be.

Teaching Methodology

• Writing requires regular modelling, teaching times and daily practice.

• Celebration (Kaizen Learning) of children's writing should be a part of the classroom programme.

• Self-assessment against success criteria empowers the learner.

• Conferencing is an integral interface between the teacher/kaiako and learner/ākonga.

• Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJ’s) will be created through regular monitoring, assessment, evaluation and student voice. 

Characteristics of an Effective Writing Lesson

• Motivation is best achieved through experiential learning.

• Clarity of learning is best achieved when learning outcomes, success criteria and exemplars are used to enhance self regulated learners.

• Teacher/kaiako modelling provides reinforcement of success criteria.

• An effective conference could include;

  • • student’s goal

    • evidence for their learning

    • next learning steps

    • teachers recording anecdotal notes

• Self-assessment empowers the learner and creates student agency.

• Teaching strategies should include: modelling, prompting, questioning, giving feedback, telling, explaining and directing.

• Individual and collective needs will be met.

Elements

The e-asTTle writing assessment tool provides a framework in which to structure planning. These elements are:

• Ideas

• Structure and Language

• Organisation

• Vocabulary

• Sentence Structure

• Punctuation

• Spelling

A balanced writing programme should include: shared writing, interactive writing, guided writing and independent writing.

Assessment

Formative Assessment & Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJ’s)

Writing OTJ’s must be based upon a variety of assessment across the NZC e.g. conferencing, anecdotal notes. 

By itself, an e-asTTle result is not sufficient to determine an OTJ. As well as the imprecision involved in a single test result, e-asTTle writing tests do not cover all the aspects of writing competence described by the literacy learning progressions. The literacy progressions look at writing across the curriculum and include continuous and non-continuous texts such as notetaking, instructions, summarising etc. Also the progressions include processes such as planning, publishing etc. which are not part of an e-asTTle assessment.