Two Weeks in classroom

Preparation for the day: Laptops set up, plugged in and all computers on ready for the day. The computers would stay on all day so there was no time wasted for start up and shut down procedures.

The day would start off with the normal roll, administration and start to the day routines. Children had been encouraged to have their handwriting, spelling and draft books ready on their desks, only a small number could remember to do this!
Before handwriting started children were asked if they knew who were the touch typers for the morning.

Once handwriting started those children could move to the computers, select a typing card and practice their touch typing in Microsoft Word.

The rest of the class would turn to the back of their handwriting books where a copy of a keyboard was pasted in and they would start practicing their home keys until I stopped them and took them through some basic drills.

Once we had spent about 5 minutes on this, then I would start the formal handwriting lesson, touch typers would continue until I call them for spelling. Spelling would be Day one copy your words from the projector into your home work books. Day two would be writing them out three times. Day Three and Four would be a projector activity they could do in their spelling books. Day five would be peer testing. Once spelling was over I would call children back to their desks for Writing.

The Writing genre was Recount. I made a Recount presentation in PowerPoint that I would show everyday using  the projector (it was also on the wall in the Writing corner).

We would revisit different parts of the recount presentation each day and discuss further. Then I would show a different published version of a recount each day
 

We would look carefully at each published piece and identify the 5 Ws, awesome adjectives, vigorous verbs, past tense, excellent connecting words and phrases etc. The children became quite practiced at doing this, especially as there were usually visiting teachers in the room at the time.

We would then work on a class recount in Inspiration. I discovered fairly quickly that the children had no experiences to talk about so we used my pup and his antics for the motivation for writing. Everyday I would show them different photos of him and tell his story about tennis balls.
 

This was the first example of the class written recount, everyday we would add to it and we would always repeat the same mantra (what is the when, who, what where), what are the awesome adjectives we have used (or vigorous verbs) what is the sequence, what words tell us that we are talking in past tense.

Eventually when the draft writing had been finished I introduced the children to the Transfer button on Inspiration. This would transfer their framework to a Word document where they could work on the text some more, add graphics, change fonts and size but the diagram would still stay the same

Incidentals would be taught as needed. I showed the children how in Inspiration 8 and in Microsoft Word you could right click on a word, go to Synonyms and find other words to replace their word.

or how they could use the Thesaurus to find more words.

Methods of Drafting

I used several methods of drafting (computer and non computer)