Over the last few weeks, we have focused on sharing messages and telling stories during ‘Writing Workshop’. We have observed the children building their stamina for writing and telling stories across pages.
In K2, ‘Writing Workshop’ is a dedicated time for Literacy, where we explore books and texts, learning more about the different ways we communicate messages, information, and stories with others. We explore mentor texts, created by authors and illustrators, to look at how they have used tools, strategies, and techniques to share their ideas and stories with their readers.
During ‘Writing Workshop’, we often confer (discuss) with the children, to help them express the ideas they share orally, through details in their drawings. We decided to look at the different techniques we could use to make our stories more interesting. We know that authors and illustrators spend a lot of time thinking about the books they make, planning their ideas and developing their craft over time. We decided to focus on looking closely at how adding more details to drawings helps the story come alive.
We invited the children to think about how they might communicate information about their story through their writing (letters and words).
We modelled a short story, providing details in the picture and thinking about what needed to be included in the drawing to help readers know all about the experience.
While creating drawings for a story, we noticed that the children often draw over their pictures to show what happened over time (sequence).
We decided to use a mentor text to look at how authors and illustrators use the technique ‘Background Perspective’ to spotlight a central image in an illustration or to show a sequence of events. In his book ‘How to Heal a Broken Wing’, we notice how Bob Graham considers where to position his drawings and how to tell his story using a sequence of pictures that show action, time, feelings and movement.
The children were invited to think about how they might use the technique in their own writing and storytelling.
We noticed the children talking more about their pictures and considering the position of elements in their drawings and the colours and words they might use to share their stories with others.
We are learning how to:
- use mark-marking to convey meaning.
- create narratives to share real or imagined experiences or events using techniques, details, and event sequences.