Boys' writing: Year 6 narrative structures

Date of issue:	Sep. 2004
Theme:	Raising boys' achievement
Audience:	Key Stage 2 teachers

LEA: Essex

School context
The school cohorts vary in size and boy/girl balance each year. The catchment area for the school is mixed.

Class context
The girl/boy ratio in this Year 6 class was evenly balanced. There was a heavier bias towards boys who were not writing at their full potential.

Reason for choosing the focus children
All writers chosen as the focus group were not fulfilling their potential as writers. Their reading and writing abilities were not matched.

Reasons for choosing focus objectives, text types and outcomes
The school follows the National Literacy Strategy medium-term plans. Year 6 were due to cover changing narrative structures.

As well as the medium-term plan objectives, the use of dialogue, describing action and structuring narrative through paragraphing were key issues on which the children needed to work.

Embedding ICT in literacy is also a key priority and the genre of fantasy offered the opportunity to use puppets and digital cameras to produce extended narratives.

Visual strategies used during the project

• The cropping tool was used to explore different viewpoints in still images.
• Pupils watched DVDs to identify the impact of camera angles on the reader and understand how they could use them in their writing.
• Puppets were used to role-play fantasy narratives. Digital cameras were used to take still images of key aspects in the story. The photographs were taken using the children's understanding of camera angles to tell the narrative from a chosen perspective.
• Children saw themselves as directors of the images/narrative.
• PowerPoint was familiar to the children but had not been used as a creative tool before. The digital still images were put into the software to generate the narrative.
• Interactive whiteboards were also integrated into shared sessions.

Impact on children and their writing
There were several ways in which the work affected the writers:

• The quality of discussions between the children and their change in attitude towards writing were very noticeable.
• Children made good progress overall, especially in attitude and self-esteem as writers.
• Children became 'directors of their words' rather than writers.
• Children's use of paragraphs improved.
• Dialogue was used by the children to move the narrative along.
• An unexpected element was the improvement in joined and fluent handwriting.
• Children began to use connectives at the beginning of sentences in order to hide the action.
• No-one had to be reminded about using words other than 'said' when reporting speech.

But perhaps most importantly, the children talked about the work outside the classroom and 'walked taller' as writers.