Instructional Texts – Be our audience…

Over the next few weeks at school, once we return from half term, we will be learning about writing effective instructional texts. (Year 6 – 10/11 year olds) I want to begin to make the most of the links that emerge so readily from blogging so I have planned to work with Jamie Wahab in Sydney, Australia.

The children from his school will be part of our audience for some shared writing we will be doing on “How To Write a Blog Comment”. We will also be producing the writing for some novice bloggers in my school.

I think that we cannot make the most of these international links and the whole essence of the flat earth unless we put into place some simple curriculum planning to embrace it. So I have planned a week of literacy lessons where the first part of the lesson – shared writing / reading – will be about constructing effective instructions for the title explained above.

• Literacy Planning Document (Google Docs)
  

It will include a range of web 2.0 based skills – including, Gliffy, Flickr and of course our class blogs. I have begun by adding a flash file to our class blog that I will use on Monday as an introduction. Perhaps the most important aspect is establishing with the children in my class that there will be a real audience for this work, who and where they are. That will be key.

Although this is a small scale project I just want to clarify the details here:

Our Aims:

• For the children who are involved to become more effective writers of instructions.
• For the children to have a greater awareness of AUDIENCE and PURPOSE.
• For the children to select appropriate style and form to suit a specific audience and purpose. (NLS T22)

Why do this using class blogs?

• Not only have we been able to establish worldwide links from our blogs but as soon as we have published our work it has a similar varied audience.
• Writing on the blog allows other children to interact with the writing process, to leave constructive criticism and to work collaboratively towards a successful piece of writing.
• The audience becomes part of the editing process.

What dialogue will occur?

• We will publish our work throughout the week including the notes we make using Gliffy or other applications. The set of instructions will also be published for others to follow on our class blog.
• The intended audience can leave feedback on the success or otherwise of the instructions we write as a class – there will be time on the Friday for us to explore some of these and to edit the writing if necessary.
• The act of commenting constructively will be a important skill for the children visiting and reading to develop.

This is not just an exclusive project, so I would very much welcome anyone to help us make it an effective unit of work – feel free to leave a comment here indicating who and where you are and if you would like to be involved. Or just explore some of the work published over at Priestsic6 from Monday onwards and leave a comment over the next few weeks.