Page 108 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Reading and Writing

Classroom Insight: Postman Pat
Mateja practices writing with her learners in a practice phrases used in writing postcards.
variety ofways, butmostofall,she tries to do Afterwards each child writes a postcard to a
activities where writing is used for communi- schoolfriend in the classroom. She assigns
cation. She brings empty postcards into the beforehand who is writing to whom so that
classroom and gives them to her pupils. each child gets a postcard. When they finish
Sometimes, pupils create their own post- writing postcards, Mateja becomes a post-
cards. First, they take a look at a postcard and man and delivers postcards to children in
discuss questions, such as ‘Who wrote it?, the classroom. At the end of the lesson, they
Who got it?, Where is it from?’ Then they write a reply to their schoolfriends.

Pre-Writing Activities
YLs in the first grades of primary school discover writing through other lan-
guage skills. They look at the books and discuss how text is organised and
they listen to rhymes and stories. They also begin noticing letters and words
in books., e.g. when the teacher reads a big book to them, they try to identify
certain words on the page. In addition to that, they need to develop orien-
tation skills, i.e. how to write letters of a similar size, on the line and within
the page. Starting with spatial orientation activities, such as moving within
the boundaries of the classroom or a special place in the classroom can help
them with orientation on a piece of paper later on.

Controlled Writing Activities
Controlled writing activities focus on practising the language and are usually
the first writing activities. In the beginning stages, children usually learn the
shapes and sounds of words, preferably through multi-sensory activities, e.g.
writing letters into the air, on somebody’s back or creating them with their
arms or whole bodies (good for kinaesthetic learners), listening to rhymes
and stories about the letters (for auditory learners), looking at pictures and
videos of letters (good for visual learners), drawing letters into e.g. sand, rice,
paint or creating letters out of clay or play dough (good for tactile learners).
A common controlled writing activity is tracing and copying simple words.
Copying can be made more interesting by varying the activities, such as ask-
ing children to select words to copy from a list or copy only words which con-
tainacertainletter,oronlysentencesthataretrueormeaningfultothem,etc.
A wide repertoire of games and activities can be used in the initial stages of
writing,suchascrosswordpuzzles,‘wordsnakes,’unscramblingwordsorsen-
tences, or filling gaps with given words or sentences, etc. Delayed copying,
suggested by Scott and Ytreberg (1990), is another task where learners read

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