The Writing Process

I have done two things this academic year which have made me think about the writing process. 

Firstly after an idea I saw on Pinterest I introduced Friday books to my year 2 children. They write a letter home to their parents every Friday telling them what they have done in school that week. The adult at home then writes a letter back. It has proved very popular with the parents as it helps keep them informed about what the children have been doing in school, provides them with conversation topics with their child and also shows them how they are progressing with their writing. The children also enjoy reading the letter that their adult writes back to them and showing their friends what their adult has written. The books also provide evidence of 'progress' and perhaps more importantly allows the children to revisit a specific genre of writing regularly and improve upon it.

Secondly I had already written about 19 blog posts from September-December 2013 but in January 2014 I set myself a challenge of writing a blog a day for 365 days starting on 1st September. So far so good, today's blog is blog 16 written since January! And believe me it has really been a challenge. Writing every day is time consuming, choosing what to write about is often difficult. I always try to be positive, write about my experiences in class and my thoughts on education generally. But I also have to think about my intended audience so It has to be as interesting and grammatically correct as I can manage!

So what has this taught me about the writing process? Well it isn't easy this writing lark, there are so many factors to take into account from content, spelling and grammar to punctuation. Also much more importantly practise makes perfect. Yet so often I know that due to the constraints of the curriculum we do not give the children the luxury of time, time to rehearse, revise and revisit. Nor do we give them the support with the spelling, grammar etc. We expect the children to consider too many things at once. I know I will now have more respect for the writing process from a child's point of view. I will try to give them:

Time to write - practice makes perfect 

Lots of genre revisits

Clear information of WILF (what I'm looking for)

Support with spelling when spelling is not the main focus

The choice of drafting (or not)