I Wonder How Stories Get Around

Description

Children come to see themselves as writers long before they are able to write conventionally. They engage in drawing and writing to tell their stories, imitate adults, play with writing materials, send messages or explore. Through many opportunities for storytelling, and rich and playful writing experiences, young children quickly learn to see themselves as writers and love the process (Pinnell and Fountas, 2011). 

Over the course of two days, this professional learning experience will allow Pre-primary and Year 1 teachers to critically reflect on their own knowledge and practice, as well as recognise how their students are writing in their play based classrooms.

We will look at children’s perceptions about writing and what this means for our classroom planning and opportunities we provide for them.

We will look at the following questions about early writers;

• What does the research say about Early Writers?
• How important is the role of oral language in the writing process?
• How do we motivate children who are reluctant writers and extend children who are natural writers?
• How do we create authentic writing tasks, where children are writing with meaning, and writing for a purpose in a child-initiated play based classroom?

We will look at practical examples of how to set up writing provocations in your early years classrooms.

And finally we will look at how we respond to children’s writing and reflect on why and how we provide feedback for the child.

Each participant will receive a copy of the text “I Wonder How Stories Get Around”. This PL will build on the reports generated from the initial research project ‘Creating Texts with 21st Century Early Learners’.

It is expected that teachers will attend the two full days of professional learning.

If possible, it would be ideal for two teachers from each school to attend together to support each other in the implementation of the ideas developed during the professional learning experience.

Please note this PD is for pre-primary and year 1 teachers only.