As I have said before I am on a mission this year to both successfully implement structured literacy and to keep the create opportunities alive. I jumped into both these aims of mine this term with both feet. No delicate toes dipped in the water, just a giant splash! One way I have capitalised on the affordances of 'create' in writing was to start at the end and probelm solve our way to the start.
By this I mean instead of starting with the exemplars of what a text type looks like, unpacking the structure and language features and exploring the vocabulary needed I tapped into our Inquiry topic of Dinosaurs and challenged my learners to begin by constructing a prototype of the skeleton of their focus dinosaur.
The prototype... Each pair was given a 1 sheet of coloured A3 paper, 2 sheets of newsprint, a vivid, a pencil, a ruler, a pair of scissors and access to the sellotape. I explained that apart of constructing their prototype I needed them to write down the steps they followed to create their model. This was hilarious to watch! The conversation was rich and purposeful as work arounds for dilemmas were suggested. The outcome, slightly wonky models with some very creatively written steps.
The teaching... To demonstrate the need for clarity and simplicity in the instructions I asked to use one of the sets of instructions that they would be happy to let me follow in front of the class. My learners had so much fun with this task I ended up having to put names in a randomiser to choose. Everyone wanted their instructions followed. To be fair I let everyone have 15 minutes to fine tune their set of instructions before I started. As always to prove a point I needed to over exaggerate what I was being asked to do. Once again we had so much fun! I did manage to construct a model that resembled a dinosaur but as I had no accurate measurements it looked nothing like the one I was trying to replicate.
The learning... We need to be specific. We need to be clear and our steps need to be written so that they can be followed accurately. We explored the 'bossy' verbs and made our adaptations. All learning that would have taken place had I taken a more formal approach, but wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. Connections to the task were made all round. I need to mention here that this was a whole class lesson for 54 students. I did have Dianne, my buddy teacher and MAt our wonderful TA as well but I led the learning. No extra scaffolding, no simplified work, just pitched at the right level because I know my learners. We used the power of collaboration and the power visual and tactile opportunities provide. Everyone regardless of ability understood the purpose of the task and knew what they needed to do. I noticed at each step of this challenge that my learners were helping each other too.
The outcome... We made the tweaks to our instructions and repeated the process. This time there was more attention paid to precision and detail. Wording of instructions were road tested on another pair, and more refined models constructed. We then formalised our learning using a scaffold for a procedural text which allowed me to reinforce the structure and language needed to be successful. To add a fun element we then had a go at creating a different dinosaur model following a set of instructions created by another pair.
The process illustrated...
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