Writing

At Garfield Primary School, our Writing mission is ’Garfield Primary School students are supported to be confident, creative and independent writers, who apply their skills to successfully communicate their ideas.’ Within our daily Writing lessons, we use a combination of approaches to support us in achieving this.

6+1 Traits of Writing

The Six plus one Trait is a way of teaching, modelling, and assessing the instruction of writing. The Six Traits of writing are Voice, Ideas, Presentation, Conventions, Organization, Word Choice, and Sentence Fluency. The one additional trait or the ‘+1’ is the presentation of writing which is acknowledged as being important but not specifically or directly taught as the other traits are.

The 6+1 Traits of Writing creates a common vocabulary and guidelines for teachers to use with students so that they become familiar with the terms used in writing and develops consistency from class to class. The Six Traits model allows teachers and students to focus on one or two elements of writing at a time, creating a more manageable and effective way for students to learn how to write.  It also is a means of providing specific feedback to students via teacher-student conferences. The Six Traits help both the student and teacher identify the areas of writing that the student needs work at improving.

PhOrMeS

PhOrMES is an acronym meaning ‘Phonology (sound letter relationships), Orthography (spelling patterns), Morphology (parts of meaning), Etymology (work origins) and Semantics (whole-word meanings)’.

Created by Shane Pearson, Speech Pathologist at Brandon Park Primary School in Melbourne’s South-East, PhOrMeS aims to equip teachers and schools with a ready-to-teach, comprehensive, whole-class curriculum which covers all these skills.

At Garfield Primary School, PrOrMES lessons are taught daily to ensure that our students develop the skills necessary to become confident and capable at spelling and determining the meaning of unknown words.

The Syntax Project

The Syntax Project is an open-source collection of grammar and syntax lessons created collectively by a group of highly skilled and qualified Australian teachers. It is a comprehensive sequence of lessons throughout the Primary School years that explicitly teaches syntax, which is defined as ‘the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.’ The Syntax Project is based upon the work of two mentor texts – The Writing Revolution and Writing matters.

The Syntax Project ensures that all students receive explicit teaching of sentence level skills that increase in complexity as they progress through the years, in a systematic and sequential manner. Creating strong, interesting and grammatically correct sentences are a fundamental building block for writing strong paragraphs and then larger texts.

At Garfield Primary School, The Syntax Project is used for one session per week with later review sessions, to ensure that we are creating Writers who are confident and competent in their use of syntax.