6 Ways to Develop Children’s Writing Composition

Children’s writing has been affected in several detrimental ways over the past year, especially those children that have not had access to a laptop or consistent support at home. From our consultancy visits in schools and talking to teachers from a range of contexts, we have seen that one of the main effects is on children’s ability to write at length and, as a result, apply the various skills around composition.

A huge component of the 2014 curriculum is developing children’s ability to write coherently and cohesively.

In KS1 the focus is on building coherence. This means sequencing writing so that the reader can follow clearly. Children should be taught sentence demarcation, tense consistency - present (simple and progressive) and simple past - as well as building multi-clause sentences with a range of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

We often say to KS1 teachers during training that, “cohesive sounds like adhesive” and this is a useful mnemonic for remembering that it is about a piece of writing sticking together clearly and staying on topic. In KS2, the focus shifts for most children to using a wider “range of devices to build cohesion (e.g. conjunctions, adverbials of time and place, pronouns, synonyms) within and across paragraphs”.

The curriculum tells us the “what” in terms of the statutory skills, but the “how” is down to us. Here are six handy tips to support you with building children’s writing composition in both key stages.

1.    Extended Written Outcomes

At the end of a sequence of work allow for several lessons to plan and draft a piece of work before publishing with children. This does not have to be a piece that extends for pages and pages, for some children this might be a paragraph or a few sentences each time, but the main point here is to give children the time to produce a comfortable completed piece of work and to not feel pressured to do it all in one go.

The important scaffold here will be your timely modelled and shared writes – choose to do this on flipchart paper - that will help them bridge through the different parts of their writing 

2.    Teach Vocabulary Explicitly

Rather than relying solely on predownloaded word banks or on the thesaurus, give children time to investigate useful synonyms and tenses in context. One focus should always be to look at a range of useful verbs at the start of a lesson and give children time to change the tenses. Which spelling rules change when adding the suffix? Which verbs are regular and irregular? Give children a range of synonyms which they must order in some way. This could be from the most to least emotive; slowest to fastest or quietest to loudest. 

3.    Noun Phrases and Pronouns

It is important to teach children a range of noun phrases and pronouns. Noun phrases will likely be adjective + noun or adjective, adjective + noun in KS1. In KS2, this will develop into noun (of) noun – a sense of pride, a pack of hungry wolves, the crashing of waves – and expanding this with a prepositional phrase – the crashing of waves under the pier.

Give children time to focus on their main character and develop a list of different kinds of noun phrases. Let’s imagine their main character is C.S. Lewis’ Aslan from the Narnia Chronicles. Noun phrases and pronouns could be:

Aslan – Pronouns and Noun Phrases

he

his

the noble lion

the golden-haired beast

the brave beast

the lion of courage

the creature of courage in front of us

This could also be done at the editing stage and children encouraged to go back over their work to build in this variation.

4.    Hands-on Adverbials

Use sentence strips to write a sentence down and experiment with sticking post-it notes with adverbials (time, place and manner) on them at different point. What likely effect will this have on the reader? Post-its on a sentence strip will allow children to play around creatively with different adverbials and the order they can be placed in a sentence. It will help children see where the commas have to be placed also. These can then go up on the working wall.

5.    Paragraphing

Give children cut up single clause sentences which they can sort into paragraphs and stick onto a piece of sugar paper. They can work in pairs in order to justify why they have sorted the sentences as they have to their partner. This would work particularly well in non-fiction writing but could also translate to narrative. We’ve often found the Tip Top acronym useful in supporting children to understand when to break into a new paragraph. We take a new paragraph when the following changes:

Tip Top =

Time

Place

Topic

Person Speaking

With formal letters and newspaper reports, allow time to plan their piece of writing making it clear the function that each paragraph does. 

6.    Edit with a Focus

It is so important for children to learn to edit as part of the writing process. Model, when writing in front of the class together, standing back after the completion of a paragraph, and reading this over in its entirety. Does it hang together? Edit your own work in front of the class and allow children time to do the same.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we hope it helps develop your class’ sense of cohesion and coherence in writing.

Posted in: Curriculum | Home Learning