Background
I created the
Recount Writer in an attempt to further scaffold the writing of the recount text type. Initially the roll out went to my maths groups. Within this group of children, there is a wide range of writing ability. Subsequent roll outs were to my reading groups, most of whom find writing difficult, and the whole class in Inquiry.
In our school, we teach the structure of a recount as TREE; title, reveal, events, ending. The reveal is meant to introduce the overall activity done and who was involved. The events detail separate parts of the activity. We generally aim for three events for a standard recount or one event for a quick recount. The latter are primarily used in short blog posts. Personal reflections of the activity come in the ending section.
Test Results
Following are three results from different students showing a reasonable amount of success. An interesting point to note is that while all three of the events were set to compulsory in the Recount Writer scaffold, only the topic sentence for each paragraph was compulsory. The examples below show that students have attempted to add further detail, for the most part.
This recount is from a student in my maths groups. This student is both new to the class and has difficulty with sentence structure, particularly tense.
The sample shows that while the student still has issues with tense, they have been able to separate the learning task into three separate events. Separating events is often a big hurdle in writing recounts and learning how to use paragraphs.
Animal Rescue Centres is a text I taught for reading. The student who wrote this is new to the school, new to using netbooks on the scale we do, and comes from a Te Reo Māori immersion kura so less experienced with writing English than other students.
We can see that they have not only separated events, but also started to think about where sentences start and stop. This is part of the how the Recount Writer was designed. The easiest next step for this student would be to remind them to use full stops at the end of their answer to each prompted question.
The fact that this student has written about what they did over several lessons as opposed to the reading tasks is an indication of where many students are at in terms of their understanding of the content they need to be blogging about.
Party popper Prototype is written by a more experienced writer who has worked their way up from being an unproductive student. All of the aspects of recount writing are present. The next step for a student like this could be to use the Recount Writer to develop single events that are detailed over multiple paragraphs. Alternatively the next step would be to take them off the writer after a bit more practise and have them write blog posts of this detail.
Next Step
The premise of a writer has been shown to have promise. The next step is to adapt this to the Information Report and Explanation text types.
