Helping children love and be good at independent writing is important. Here, we reveal our four-step plan to achieve this goal.

What constitutes independent writing? There has been a lot of discussion within teaching circles about this. In this piece, we examine ideas for engaging children in writing independently so they are able to produce their best pieces.

Writing can often seem like a chore and a teacher’s role is to help change this perception. Here are four key approaches to help make writing fun.

Make writing special

Introduce a special book for every child that is dedicated to writing tasks only. Introduce each writing exercise by suggesting that the book is for exploring their own ideas and refer to each child as ‘writers’ or ‘authors’ able to shape their writing as they wish. You could also provide pictorial and video prompts as a starting point for many of the writing tasks. This should help produce a higher standard of writing and help make the process of writing much more enjoyable.

Marking

Offer each child individual feedback when marking their writing pieces. This will ensure that each child knows their personal strengths and areas to improve. This will help them to have set goals around improving on their writing abilities– for some, it might be remembering full stops and capital letters, for others it might be using more ambitious vocabulary or using commas to control meaning. By doing this, each child becomes more confident at writing independently and will know what to look for when editing their work.

Transferable skills

Guided writing sessions should include explanations on key concepts such as plot, structure and vocabulary. Each child will then feel able to apply these skills to any piece of writing where it is required. By having regular opportunities to write independently, children have learned which of these are important to include in their writing and this will give each piece more depth.

Purposeful Writing

Children love to know that their work will be read and that readers will respond to what has been written. Tasks with this in mind might include asking the children to write stories for children in another class in school, writing a persuasive letter to the local councillors, or writing an article that could appear in the school newsletter or local newspaper. There is a sense of pride and excitement among the children when they are reading their work aloud to younger children or receive a reply in the post to a letter they have sent. Children need the chance to be creative and imaginative and to know the importance of communicating clearly with others and they need to find the confidence to do this and do it well.

To find out more about a First Class Learning franchise, simply click the orange button and submit your details.