Boys' writing: Reception traditional tales

Date of issue:	Sep. 2004
Theme:	Raising boys' achievement
Audience:	Key Stage 1 teachers, Foundation Stage practitioners

School context
The school has a low baseline entry for children and a traditional lack of parental involvement that the school is working to reverse. All staff had begun to focus on integrating media texts last year and wanted to extend the practice further.

Class context
The class had a heavy gender bias, with 18 boys and nine girls. Consideration of gender was a high priority during the year.

Reasons for choosing focus children
The boys chosen for the research are not necessarily the least able in the class. I chose them because although they were not working full strech, they were the ones who do write something. They are underachieving as writers because they lack motivation and need teacher input to achieve in this area. Most of the boys' experience of writing has been through letter formation and copying at home. The children are very young and cannot always express themselves clearly.

Reasons for choosing focus objectives, text types and outcomes
We were due to cover traditional tales on our medium-term plans, which allowed for one week per text. The video of Peter Pan fitted into the planning. It was a familiar text to the children and we hoped it would extend home-school links. We also wanted the children to make their own book to develop their feelings of ownership through seeing their writing published.

Visual strategies used during the project
During the project we used a range of visual strategies:

• Digital stills of role-play were taken as prompts for writing, drawing and discussion.
• Short clips of film were shown and read with the children.
• Pictures from accompanying books of the films were used as prompts.
• Still images were used and added to.
• Children did freeze-framing based on the clips from the video and characteristics of the characters.

Impact on children and their writing
I was thrilled with the way that the boys had responded to the taught units. They were able to give many more ideas about how to set about writing a story. They stressed ideas rather than technicalities. All the boys were far more aware of how to get started.

The biggest impact has been on their ideas, concentration, sequencing of events and description of settings and characters. They have used a wider range of vocabulary; Kemal used the word 'covered' to describe a field of bluebells. The writing has more description, the boys add settings to the stories and they have also been using phrases from the video. The quantity of writing has increased and the children were willing to attempt spellings themselves.