The Beehive website provides a picture-of-the-day to inspire writing. You can click the ‘Tune In’ option to disguise the picture and have your child guess what the image could be. There's a lot of useful features for teaching writing such as discussion questions, a timer, a sentence interactive, and a story interactive.
Good writing brings together a lot of different skills. For example, telling a good story and neat handwriting have very little in common. Here’s a good way of thinking about the skills that children need to write well:
➤ Letter level: Handwriting
➤ Word level: Spelling
➤ Sentence level: Sentence structure (and some additional grammar such as speech marks)
➤ Elaboration level: Rich writing (for example, adjectives or similes)
➤ Text level: Genre writing (for example, story writing or an information report)
At home, you can offer your child the kind of focused writing support and feedback that teachers, with many students to manage, simply can't match. When planning what to focus on, just start at the simplest level (handwriting) and move up from there. Here’s some suggestions for teaching each skill:
The Tectonic handwriting system is still under development.
Spelling is developed in two main stages; phonetic (sounding out words) and then orthographic (spelling words correctly).The phonetic stage relies on phonics development and is closely linked to reading. The orthographic stage relies on developing strategies for memorising word spelling (e.g. say it like you spell it: 'wed-nes-day').
The Tectonic reading app, Paper Castle, has daily practice for spelling that progresses from phonetic spelling to learning strategies to memorise word spelling.
It is common to find that children learning to write struggle with run-on sentences (i.e. very long sentences that use 'and' repeatedly). That's why helping children understand the basics of sentence structure is important.
To practice sentences on The Beehive, click ‘More’ and then click the sentence type you want to practice. This will bring up the sentence interactive, which covers the three main sentence types (simple, compound and complex) in child-friendly language.
Developing rich writing can be thought of in three main stages:
1) Word selection: Using descriptive words (e.g. ancient) and more specific words (e.g. 'shouted', rather than 'said')
2) Literary devices: For example, simile, metaphor and hyperbole
3) Imagined details: Children close their eyes and describe what they would see, hear and smell if they were in a story. Then they use those ideas to guide their writing.
On The Beehive website, you can use the picture-of-the day to practice story writing. To see the story interactive, just click ‘More’ and then ‘Story Writing’. First, make up a story with your child using each of the five stages. Then each stage can become a paragraph for a short story.
