Explore, Innovate, Invent – three stages to better writing!

When you sit down to write something on word, what are your first thoughts when you see a white, blank document? How about as a child in school when you were asked to write a story, letter or poem with only your thoughts to help you?

It is unfair to expect good quality writing from children when they’ve had no preparation or support in the ‘planning stage’. It would be like asking someone to drive somewhere without following a map or even know where the end point is.

We write for many different reasons, and in order for our writing to be of high quality, we must know what it should look like by the end.

Through first exploring a variety of different texts and writing pieces similar to what the children are learning in English, they can become familiar with this ‘end point’ in the project. Children can learn how the language is used within a specific piece of writing depending on the context; for example, language and tone used in Newspapers and entirely different to Stories. Children can also learn to see how we adapt our vocabulary and grammar depending on the audience we are writing for, whether it is a friend or stranger, the age of our audience, or whether we are writing for a specific reader or a general audience.

Once we have explored, children need to move onto innovating text pieces. By taking away the pressures of starting from a blank canvas, children can further learn what is needed in a text, through up levelling written pieces with specific vocabulary or improving sentence structures. While innovating, children continually absorb language, grammar structure and ideas that will help them for when they write their own pieces.

We now come to the final stage of writing – the inventing stage. Children are ready to write their own texts, whether newspapers, stories or letters. While completing a variety of tasks in the early stages, children have absorbed huge amounts of content and language that will provide inspiration for their own writing. With this early support, children will feel more confident and have a sense of independence compared to a teacher asking them to write something from scratch.