Year 7-8

What are the children learning?

During Year 7-8, the focus for students is to confidently and independently use a wide range of writing strategies and skills, to meet the demands of specific learning tasks across the curriculum. Students also need to be able to respond to the writing of others and to express their response in writing.

When students at this level create text, they:

• understand their purposes for writing and how to achieve those purposes (e.g., by using different ways to examine and present their own thinking and knowledge)

• plan effectively, where appropriate, by using strategies such as mind mapping or skills such as information-literacy skills to find and record the information they need for their writing

• create content that is concise and relevant to the curriculum task, often including carefully selected detail and/or comments that supports or elaborates on the main points

• craft and recraft text by revising and editing, checking that the text meets its purpose and is likely to engage the intended audience, and proofreading the text to check the grammar, spelling, and punctuation

• actively seek and respond to feedback on their writing

• define paragraphs, within which the ideas are clearly related and linked within and between paragraphs

• write grammatically correct sentences

• use words and phrases that are appropriate to the topic, register, and purpose, including expressive, academic, and subject-specific vocabulary

What does it look like in the classroom?

Writing in the classroom does not happen only at ‘writing time’. Students are provided with opportunities throughout the day to use writing in various ways.

Student agency is developed through sharing assessment information such as e-asTTle with students, this enables them to see what they can do well and what they need to work on, which they then use when signing up for writing workshops.  The specific language that we use when we are talking about texts, in both reading and writing settings, is designed to help them to understand what aspects of writing they are focusing on.

We also provide opportunities for students to read and/or listen to and discuss their own and others’ writing as members of an interactive learning community.

An example of a written text, by the end of Year 8: