Children are increasingly needing extra support when writing. Add these alternative writing and scaffolding techniques to your Quality First Teaching toolkit. They may reduce pupil anxiety and therefore improve outcomes, especially when the objective is not writing (e.g. a Science or Geography concept).
Vygotsky stated back in 1989 that, “what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.” This concept has never changed and high quality scaffolding is the bridge between ‘I can’t do it’ to ‘I am doing it.’ With many children, although they struggle with the written word, their verbal ideas hold much more clarity. Being able to capture this in a busy classroom is challenging yet imperative. Both for them to make progress and for you to know how much they know.
Children need to be in their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in order to learn and make progress. For many children, after several months of learning at home (or not learning), extra scaffolding may be required the bridge the void between lockdown learning and usual school expectations. Use this period of lower teacher scrutiny (hopefully!) and higher pupil anxiety to try out some of these ideas. I’d love to hear your feedback!
Click the above download for a pdf version. There are of course, many other ideas than this – if you have an extra one, please add it in the comments at the bottom.
Scaffold writing using a writing frame – either specific and designed by you or a general one which can be used time and time again.
Use a laptop to type or a wordbank program such as Clicker.
Record the information as a voice memo and play it back to the class.
Use an adult to scribe. This will support their verbal ideas so that they can record them all and the teacher knows they have understood a concept.
Provide posts it so the child can write small chunks of information at a time – less daunting than a blank page.
Let children have some ownership in how they present. Give them more of a choice. They could do a poster or a leaflet.
Use voice recording software to record a sentence at a time before writing it down – you can get voice memo post cards for this as well. TTS have some here: https://www.tts-group.co.uk/talk-time-recordable-postcards-a6-30-second/1003984.html
Create a mindmap! This can support key vocabulary for a topic. Mindmap theory here: https://www.mindmapping.com/theory-behind-mind-maps.php
Draw pictures to illustrate your ideas – fold paper into 6 and draw arrows to link the pictures.
Let the child use a pocket spelling checker or Ipad to build confidence. My daughter has ‘asked Siri’ for all her spellings during lockdown which has improved the quality of her work and her confidence in using interesting vocabulary.
Provide a key vocabulary mat for the child to refer to whilst writing – find one online or write a basic one freehand in a couple of minutes.
Provide your pupil with sentence starters to aid their thought processes.
Thanks for reading,