This term room 12 has been doing paired writing. We were the first class in the school, so you could probably say we were more of trialing it.
First, I am going to tell you what paired writing is:
It is a special program that helps other kids who are not very skilled at writing and who get stuck and don't know what to do, Get some help or know what to do.
It is all very easy as all you need is a tutor and a tutee. The tutor is the person who is teaching and the tutee is the lesser skilled one, that oftenly doesn't like writing and will not really know what to do.
So, get a folder, fill it with all this special papers, and then you just do this:
- 5 minutes of planning for a random story-The tutor will write out the brainstorm and the tutee will come up with the ideas.
- 10 minutes of writing the story- The tutee writes out the story with the help of the tutor. Make sure the tutor doesn't just say what the answer is and just help them out!
- 5 minutes of proof reading- The tutor will scan over and check spelling and will talk about the goals set, then finally... Count out the words and follow the instructions on the word count sheet in the folder
Now, the three things I have learnt/improved on is to not to do the things people need help with, but tell them. Improving on my response to people when they need some help rather then saying: You should already know that, and just help them. And finally it has given me some ideas for stories if my classroom were to have freewriting again.
Two comments I would give to my tutee Nazaryth is that I believe he has improved on descriptive writing, as well as an amazing 318 words in one day!
One thing that has challenged me is that I wasn't allowed to tell the buddy how to spell it, as I was really used to doing that!
