Boys' writing: Year 1 'Pocahontas'

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

LEA: Essex

School context
The school is an inclusive school with a mixed catchment.

Class context
The class had an even split of boys and girls. The children had an average spread of abilities and needs, though more boys were underachieving as writers. The class had a high percentage of young, summer-born boys.

Reasons for choosing focus children:
All six boys seemed to be underachieving in their writing. William, Craig and Carlton are the more articulate children in the group. I thought that this could be an influence on their ability to rehearse their ideas orally, which I considered as a bonus for the project we were going to undertake.

Some key issues for these children were as follows.
Leon used simple sentences, no punctuation was evident and few ideas were used in his writing.
William used simple sentences.
Craig found generating ideas hard.
Jai needed to extend sentences.
Henry found generating ideas hard.

Reasons for choosing focus objectives, text types and outcomes
The school follows the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) medium-term plans and the NLS range of text types. Key objectives were highlighted that related to using media and would make an impact on areas in which children needed to improve their writing.

Outcomes for the short-tem plans were chosen so that children would be able to write a finished product, such as a book, rather than an extract or short text. There was a specific focus on drama and role-play as outcomes as well as written texts.

Visual strategies used during the project
Video was watched first for enjoyment, then in selected scenes to develop narrative writing, choice of vocabulary, descriptions of emotions and character traits.

The activities used included:

• storyboards of favourite scenes. Labels, captions and sentences were also added;
• contrasting two settings from the film and collecting vocabulary to describe both;
• writing speech bubbles to predict characters' dialogue using paused scenes from the film;
• using whiteboards to plan questions children wanted to ask characters as a precursor to hot-seating;
• hot-seating key characters from films, with teachers and children in role;
• using key images from the film to write a synopsis of the narrative. Narratives were collated and published as books;
• pausing scenes from the film to generate predictions, responses and new vocabulary.

We extended the work to a cross-curricular project on Native American culture

Impact on children and their writing
The video motivated everyone in the class, boys and girls. I am sure the powerful images and music inspired the children. They were all keen to start writing straight away. By planning pieces of work that allowed the children to gather ideas, and using word banks, caption writing, drawings and storyboards, children were able to formulate further ideas quickly. The children referred to their notes and discussed them with talk partners. Three boys were particularly keen to write, often not wanting to stop for help with spelling as they had done previously. I was surprised at how much the boys wrote, surpassing anything they had previously written. The children were proud of their finished pieces of work and I am sure it gave them the incentive to try again on the next piece.

This has an implication for my planning. The written outcome needs to be given enough time, built up over weeks, so that the children work to their full potential.