Reflection of Year 5/6 Writing Inquiry- Stepping out writing.

The focus in our Year 5/6 hub was to improve engagement for our students in writing. The aspect that I worked on to do this was with a writing style stepping out writing established by Pie Corbett . You can read more about this in the link to my earlier blog post and on Pie Corbett's YouTube clip  here.

The first step for me was to learn a little about what Stepping out writing was and to adapt what I had learned and implement a succinct programme for all students in Tumu Hub that was inspiring and motivational and that ultimately improved engagement and writing abilities. Stepping out writing did seem to be suited to a slightly lower level, however I adapted what I did to suit our Year 5/ 6 group. I am particularly passionate about sharing well written picture books with older students to help motivate them. I did this by sharing stories from The stinky Cheese Man, and used this as inspiration so together the writing groups were able to focus on innovation of other text.

It was exciting that all four teachers had a separate focus and that all had the opportunity to work with students across the hub. We each had an opportunity to work with students over Term 2 and 3.

Although I don't have data that explicitly indicates what I did improved students writing abilities what I did notice in term of positive outcomes was:

•  Students were enthusiastic and engaged in step out writing workshops.
• When they were ready to step out their writing and add specific actions and characterisation to their work they did so enthusiastically, with loads of energy and with big smiles.
• Instead of complaints regarding " What am I going to write about they seemed to have more ideas than previously.
• There was an evident shift with reluctant writers.
• Some students asked if they could do more and some chose to do more during SUW time or even in their own time.
• We created time to share our ideas in sessions and giving students an audience, although small created positive energy and enjoyment of others ideas and work.

Some minor issues I noticed that could be taken into consideration for future instruction:

• As students had so many ideas some struggled to maintain sensible structure and flow at times. These students required extra 1-1 support. Our programme didn't always allow adequate time for this.
• At times some students got so carried away with animation that they lost some focus of the main content/ flow of their story.

There was much evidence in children's work of success and finally one of the struggling writers within our hub has in my opinion completed his better piece of writing as step out writing. He was most proud of this piece.