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Literacy at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1e. Balance in teaching writing
Student teachers need to consider ways of balancing the need to improve children’s technical competence with their ability to express ideas and communicate confidently with an audience. Modelling and demonstration can play a key role here, particularly with children in the Foundation Stage and Year 1.
Student teachers need to have experience of:
- whole class ‘Shared Writing’ , where the teacher chooses a topic of real interest to the children, and talks her way through the decisions she makes as she writes;
- group writing activities, where the children support each other in composition as well as spelling;
- individual writing activities, where the teacher responds to what the child is saying as well as to her mastery of technical matters.
Our student teachers need to learn both how to demonstrate what it is they do as they write, and also how to support children’s early attempts at writing for themselves. Understanding Literacy Development, (Geekie et al. 1999) referred to earlier, can be extremely useful in helping student teachers achieve this balancing act.
The CLPE videos, Literacy in the Early Years and Writing at Key Stage 1 (CLPE, 2001a and 2001b) give excellent demonstrations of these processes in real classrooms.
In very many schools, the teaching of writing becomes more formal in Years 1 and 2, with a focus on the product rather than the process, on the form of writing rather than the content that it communicates. Student teachers are expected to comply with the school’s approach and detailed planning. Their challenge is to reconcile the demands for measurable results with the insights offered by their study of literacy and literacy learning, and by their observations of children’s learning in this area. Our role is to help them negotiate this delicate path.
 
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