Primary 6 pupils from St Margaret’s PS are delighted to be sharing how they use the visualiser to help them with their writing. A visualiser is a camera that projects your work onto the  interactive white board. We put our work under the visualiser so that the class can help us improve our writing. They spot our mistakes and help us improve them.

 

 

A typical P6 writing lesson

A typical P6 writing lesson begins with Miss McKenzie giving us a topic to focus on. We then do some writing exercises to get in the right mind-set. Sometimes we continue author’s stories e.g. The Elephant Train! Caity said “I enjoy my writing and find I can express myself.” After we’ve finished our writing we put it under the visualiser or we assess someone’s work. We then point out our positives, next steps and marvellous mistakes. “Sometimes we make mistakes but we always learn from them.” said Lily-Grace.

Opinions about our writing

Theo pointed out that “At the start of each term we do an assessment to determine what level we are at.”In our writing we like to share what we’ve done during the time given. We also enjoy writing imaginative, fictional stories.  Here are some of our thoughts on our writing:

“I really enjoy writing, even though I don’t always meet my target that I set for myself” Emily F

“I’m not the best at writing, but one day I think I will enjoy it more than now.” Anna B

“I think I make great stories and I should improve my hand writing.” Jake

“I find that having a set target encourages me to think more about my writing.” Rachel D

 

How we use the visualiser

We use the visualiser when we are writing. It helps us because we get feedback on our work. We call mistakes “Marvellous Mistakes” because we all learn from them. It also makes it sound more positive. We use “Next Steps” to correct our class mates’ writing – they are things that you could improve on or change. We also use the visualiser to find “Positive Points” in our writing. We usually use it half-way through our writing so we can fix the corrections of our first half. Everyone finds the visualiser very helpful in our class – Rachel G explained “I enjoy writing and sometimes make mistakes but that is OK because I learn from them“!

We will finish our blog post with a few more opinions about writing:

“Writing helps you develop your skills, VCOP, imagination and hand writing” Violet

“I find it hard but I always get through it.” Daisy – we think this shows that we have growth mind sets and determination towards our learning!

Thank you for reading our blog post, here are some tips to improve your writing:

• neatness
• silence when you are writing
• imagination
• vocabulary
• pictures

Yvonne McBlain, curriculum support teacher and Miss McKenzie, class teacher for primary 6M were delighted to support the creation of this blog post by the pupils. First, each group of pupils in the class analysed a blog post as a text. They discussed the purpose of this type of writing, then planned their very first blog post. The pupils also organised themselves into collaborative groups with specific tasks to get the post written as efficiently as possible. Each group created their copy, then took it for typing up and publication in this blog post.

Miss McKenzie will Tweet the link to this blog post so that our writing work can be shared with parents, carers and relatives who use Twitter to follow what we do in school. We hope those who read this post enjoy finding our more about how we develop and improve our writing skills and look forward to any comments people choose to leave us below.