Teaching Writing Strategies

Teaching Writing Strategies uses modelling, guided and independent practice to teach pupils strategies they can use to improve the clarity, correctness and richness of their writing. The focus is on sentences, their structure, punctuation and word choices and on developing editing and proofreading skills and their habitual use. Teaching Writing Strategies is a series of six books with the explicit, overarching aim of teaching the skills and strategies required to improve the clarity, correctness and richness of children’s writing. Within the series, children are taught to recognise, choose and use specific strategies. The focus is on the process, rather than on practising, in this instance, specific text types. To this end, priority is given to improving writing at the sentence level. There is a strong hands-on emphasis; that is, there is an expectation that the children will write to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding. Unlike many other writing activity books, the desired outcome is to have the children structuring correct, enriched sentences to more clearly convey ideas and information. The ultimate goal is for them to produce clear, precise writing for a specific purpose and to understand that proofreading and editing is an integral part of the writing process. Each of the 16 units has a page of assessment activities and an assessment writing topic. These should be worked on independently and will: (a) give the teacher a record of individual understanding and achievement; and (b) highlight common points of weakness, which may require further assistance. Teacher recording sheets, a pupil proofreading checklist and a pupil self-evaluation sheet are provided.