Shared Writing and Innovation
Shared Writing is when the Teacher facilitates writing with the class. The Teacher creates an aspirational text before hand with prompt questions (this is to help the teacher guide the piece of writing being focussed on). During shared writing, the Teacher will set a particular scene and students will provide their ideas to assist with the shared writing. The teacher asks questions targeting the type of ideas, language and/or writing features they want to teach. This can be done word by word or sentence by sentence. The Teacher will use their tool kit created so far in the Storytelling sessions such as plot matrixes, mood maps, boxing up, word walls, pictures, maps, plot and character types to assist with the shared writing experience.
Another focus of shared writing is to demonstrate how to show what's happening in a story rather than tell. For example, "Mum was cross", you could write, "Mum's face was flaming red and her eyes were as big as saucers".
Below are video snap shots of a shared writing session in Room 2. Mrs Kearns shared writing session focussed on describing the setting of the Billy Goats Gruff. She has her aspirational text and prompt questions to help guide the shared writing. Mrs Kearns used the word by word response from the children to help describe the setting.
Innovation is where the intention is to change the main elements in the story. The plot structure stays basically the same but the plot context is changed. This could be done in three different ways:
- substitution
- addition
- plot recycling
Miss Spence and Room 17 innovated the story "The Freedom Bird". To begin this process, Miss Spence showed the original plot matrix of the story and explained they were going to change some parts of the story. First the class choose a different character for the story. The students gave their ideas and Miss Spence recorded their ideas on the board. Miss Spence then choose one of the ideas and used the thinking aloud technique to give her reasons why. She wrote the idea onto a post it note and put it onto the original plot matrix. Next, the class brainstormed where the story could be set. The process of thinking aloud was repeated. This is seen below in a quick video snapshot of Miss Spence selecting the new scene for their story.
Finally, Miss Spence got the class to come up with ideas of how they could kill the new character (in the Freedom Bird, the hunter used a bow and arrow).
Below are some photos showing some of the process of Innovating the Freedom Bird.
Ideas for setting:
Original plot matrix:
Changes made:
Miss Spence then facilitated a shared writing session with the class creating a new introduction to the story, using the new setting and characters chosen. Here is the shared writing sample written by Room 17. This was written up on the whiteboard as the class created the introduction together.
Keep watching this blog to find out about the next step of our journey, non-fiction texts.
