It's also become clear that writing can be a tricky area to hook the children's interest in. She's a fickle mistress. One of my boys started one writing task off very slowly to the extent that I thought I would get very little from him. The following day he went for it and did his best writing to date! The praise I gave him seemed to motivate him greatly and consequently he seemed more engaged in other tasks the following day.
My learning to date would be as follows:
- make sure kids are as settled as possible before starting with clear expectations
- talk through the task before hand and input in as much awesome vocab/grammar as possible
- try to engage the children as much as possible
- scaffold the task and have that scaffold available to the kids
- monitor/help/praise/manage
I want to really try to engage the kids more to the tasks. I did a little piece of mime to motivate them to write about the 100m sprint which went down well.
Ahhhh, praise, a great motivator.
ReplyDeleteHow are the scaffolds helping them to write better/more that they would be able to on their own?