Innovate and Try #1...

With my targeted group of reluctant writers I know anything I plan must capture their interest, seem achievable and have a clear end point. By chance I recently followed a thread on social media that linked to Pie Corbett's Talk 4 Writing site, and saw ideas that I could use that would do exactly that. 

At the start of this term we started looking at narratives using the mentor text 'Fly by Night' by June Crebbin. My thinking behind this learning was that my learners would notice the structure and language features used by the author to paint a clear picture in the reader's mind. To begin I read the text (minus pictures) aloud and asked my learners to listen carefully to the words the author used. Our next step was to create our own text maps that would help us retell the story. This proved to be a valuable exercise as the vocabulary that was noticed and shared for discussion and clarification initiated a powerful learning conversation about the author's word choice and use of sentence type for effect.