What’s on the Writing Hub?
Teaching writing in years 1–8
This section provides a wealth of practical information that will help you support your students to use writing as an integral part of their learning across all areas of the curriculum. There are three sets of materials:
- Teaching Writing in Years 1–3: Building a Strong Foundation (PDF 965KB)
- Teaching Writing across the Curriculum in Years 4–6: Increasing Progress (PDF 1.3MB)
- Teaching Writing in Years 7–8: Accelerating Progress (PDF 1.1MB)
These resources will help you to:
- understand the writing demands and expectations across the curriculum in years 1–8
- identify your students’ particular learning needs
- plan deliberate acts of teaching to accelerate your students’ progress
- use writing for a variety of purposes across the curriculum
- maximise writing opportunities in your classroom
- assess your students’ progress in writing
- build your own knowledge of text features and purposes.
Research with teachers identified three main “drivers” when planning for teaching writing. These are shown in the following diagram.
Because these drivers are interconnected, every learning task and activity that you plan for your students will include all three, no matter which driver you start with.
The resources in this section of the hub include case studies, each at a different year level and showing one of these drivers as a starting point for planning. The case studies will help you to identify the writing demands relating to the big ideas of a particular curriculum topic and to plan strategies for helping your students meet these demands.
Science, year 6 – Understanding a unique environment (native bush and stream)
Starting point for planning
The planning started with the learning context: a three-day school camp near a stand of native bush and a stream.
Case study 3_Science year 6 (PDF, 470 KB)
Big ideas
The main focus for learning (from the science curriculum, level 4: Living World – Ecology) was how living things are suited to their particular habitat and how they respond to environmental changes.
Learning tasks
The teacher planned a range of tasks to help the students develop their understanding of the big ideas and of the processes scientists use to gather and record information. Working independently and in groups, the students used their writing to:
- record information in science notebooks
- describe after close observation, attributes of plants and animals, using specialised scientific vocabulary
- organise field notes into classification and comparison tables
- explain how specific attributes enable animals and plants to survive and thrive in their environment
- suggest actions that could be taken to ensure the sustainability of this environment.
Approaches to teaching writing and supporting the writing process
These two sections have links to existing material on the Literacy Online website from Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1–4 and 5–8.