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Writing: Strategies

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Children Playing with Colourful Blocks

Strategies

  • Make explicit links to prior learning and share steps, so child or young person (CYP) know what to expect.
  • Adapt and adjust resources to be appropriate and relevant to the needs of the CYP.
  • Provide specific meaningful praise and feedback when a CYP persists and or achieves something new. Provide verbal feedback for the next steps in learning.
  • To support memory use talking tins by storing instructions, information, or sentences.
  • Teach older CYP how to develop note-taking skills including using mind-maps or sketch notes.
  • Model writing skills before the CYP attempts this independently.
  • Provide appropriate scaffolding. This may vary from child to child.
  • To develop sentence construction consider using Colourful Semantics. Cambridgeshire Speech and Language Therapy service provides training.
  • If the CYP has spelling difficulties, teach different relevant strategies and encourage the CYP to identify which strategy works best for them to develop their metacognitive skills.
  • Punctuation prompt card attached to exercise book
  • Consider the use of pen grips, writing slopes and ergonomic pens.
  • Think about the lines in the exercise book; are they too small for the child’s handwriting at this point?
  • Ensure CYP who struggle with handwriting or spelling have enough opportunities to develop their writing composition skills.
  • From KS2 onwards, increasingly use letter names, do not sound to support spelling and to reduce ambiguity where graphemes have multiple associated phonemes.
  • Check the pupil’s understanding of a sentence - do they know one spoken word is represented as one written word?
  • Encourage pupils to say their sentence aloud several times before writing, a talking tin could be used to support this.
  • Mindmaps can be used to generate ideas; to organise, plan and structure a piece of writing.
  • Use graphic organisers such as a paragraph planner or story frame to support the structure of writing.
  • Break down writing tasks using a task planner.
  • Use word maps to develop vocabulary.
  • School handwriting font shared with parents.
  • Work with CYP’s families around ways to support their skills and confidence with writing at home.

Techniques

  • iPad Apps for learners with literacy difficulties or dyslexia.
  • Android apps for learners with literacy difficulties or dyslexia.

Opportunities for alternative forms of recording enable a child or young person to demonstrate knowledge without the requirement for an extended written response.

If fine motor skills are an area of difficulty, see the Cambridgeshire Occupational Therapy website for further advice.

  • Consider vocabulary - ELKLAN materials (Language Builders 5-11 book) for vocabulary development.
  • Consider using a Talking Boxes approach for language and vocabulary development.
  • Find out about training from the Speech and Language therapy service around language development such as ‘Word Aware.’

Helpful strategies and approaches include Understanding Working Memory: A Classroom Guide [Size: 367 KB, File: PDF].

Glossary

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Glossary page