Welcome to Parliament Oak Public School!

DEMYSTIFYING WRITING IN SCHOOL
Remember when handwriting was a grade on report cards? Those days are long gone as the skill of handwriting is no longer found in the current Ontario curriculum. Our understanding of what constitutes effective ‘writing to communicate’ has evolved over the years, thus curricular expectations have changed to reflect this contemporary understanding. To begin to demystify how teachers evaluate student writing, this article will explore the various facets of the Writing curriculum so as to build a common understanding between home and school.

In a nutshell, the 25 expectations in the Writing curriculum (in each of Grades 1-8) can be summed up in 4 statements:

Students should be able to:
1) generate and organize ideas appropriate for a specific purpose and audience (i.e. Ideas used in an email to a friend are different than ideas used to write a cover letter for a résumé);
2) draft and revise their writing, using informational (e.g. research project), literary (e.g. poem) and graphic (e.g. poster) forms;
3) identify and use strategies to edit, proofread and publish their work
4) reflect on their writing, identifying strengths and next steps.

From those 4 statements, can you guess which poses the greatest challenge for our students? If you guessed number 1, you are correct. School-based, board, and provincial data show our students struggle most with the generation of ideas (and sufficient detail) for a specific purpose and audience. This may be surprising, but when you think further about it, it could be why so few people make a living at authoring texts. That is to say, Stephen King earns a living from writing not because he’s a great speller or impeccable grammarian (that’s his editor’s job), it’s due to the ideas he generates and how he is able to tailor these ideas to engage his audience.

Teachers are using a variety of instructional strategies to improve students’ skills in the generation of ideas. Some of these strategies include: more oral discussion before students are asked to write; the use of graphic organizers (4-square; webs, AEO etc.); and descriptive, timely and specific feedback on writing from both teacher and peers. Because of an increased focus on these areas, as parents you may notice (and lament!) that less instructional time is spent on things like handwriting, spelling and grammar. Certainly those skills play a role in the developing writer’s toolbox, but those skills are best learned within a context (through reading another published author, for example) as opposed to isolated skill practice (how many times has your child ‘memorized’ words for a spelling test, only to misspell them a week later in a journal entry?).

The goal of writing is to communicate thoughts. In order to do this effectively, developing writers need to acquire a plethora of skills. Rest assured that we are working daily to improve these skills and to ascertain that our students are able to get their messages across clearly and concisely. ~ Written by Melanie Sendzik, VP and Literacy Coach, DSBN

ABOUT PARLIAMENT OAK
Our school is a place for all students to achieve success and participate actively! We are proud to be an Eco-School and encourage you to be an active part of this program both at home and at school. There are many opportunities or students to be involved at Parliament Oak. Sports and clubs are always available, volunteer jobs are offered each term and students are encouraged to participate with PRIDE and make the most of every OPPORTUNITY in order to ensure their SUCCESS at school.