Welcome to another guest blogger ~ Pixie Anne with some ideas to help you with
Hello!
I'm Pixie Anne from Growing Little Learners and I am delighted to be blogging here at the amazing Adventures in Literacy Land today to share how we use a Working Wall in Literacy in my classroom.
Working Walls are such a great way to have an up to date, relevant, child led display that supports learning in the classroom and helps the children to see the bigger picture and learning journey they are on!
An added bonus is that they are so easy to throw together throughout the week as you are doing the work in class anyway - no extra cutting and laminating at home, no hunting for the perfect image or trying to be super creative with ideas! I love mine!
So today I've decided to share how my most recent one came together and there's a freebie for you at the end so keep on reading...
The Working Wall always starts with an example of what we are aiming for by the end of the week (What A Good One Looks Like).
We began our week of instruction writing (inspired by George's Marvelous Medicine) by Gathering Content. We investigated bossy verbs and adverbs by playing some simple games (Simon Says and Adverb Charades) and then looked at a whole bunch of different instruction texts to hunt for examples of each to add to the working wall.
To understand and explore the features of the genre and create a Success Checklist I brought in lots of recipe books from home. They were out on tables with post it notes when the children arrived in the morning and I challenged them to work in pairs to find and label some of the features they could see.
We had a class discussion about the features they spotted and I jotted them down on strips of paper to refer to in the next activity. I gave out copies of recipes for them to annotate with the features. This was a perfect chance for me to gather a bit of reading evidence too - understanding the features of a non fiction text!
The wall so far...
Next came the Planning. We had a lot of fun coming up with disgusting ingredients together in some shared writing (my poor Learning Support Assistant was looking a bit green by the end of the session!),
This girl had lots of good ideas!
We also planned ideas for the method using time connectives and all the bossy verbs and adverbs we had previously generated.
Here's how the wall was looking at this point. I desperately need a bigger wall but have no space in my classroom so I have to squash it all in as best I can!
Then comes the Drafting! We recapped what we had learned so far (using the wall!), I modeled my own recipe and then asked them to work on their own.
My support group still really struggled to set the instructions out correctly even with a writing frame and had the method written in the 'you will need' section but the content and what they were trying to write was good! Here is one from one of my stronger writers and this was added to the wall as a best example.
We ran out of time and I couldn't squeeze on the Editing and Improving heading. We will bring to a published form for a class recipe book next week but for now the working wall is complete and shows the learning journey we went on when writing our instruction texts!
I really do love these displays and strongly feel they support the learning in the classroom.
I feel a little embarrassed by the tatty headings I have on the board, so I have created some new ones to use which I want to share with you! Click here or on the picture below to grab your freebie! There are different choices of headings depending on how you phrase things in your classroom.
I hope you've found some inspiration or ideas here that you can use! I'd love to hear how you use working walls in your classroom or any tips you have on how I can improve mine so please leave a comment or contact me over on my blog (Growing Little Learners)!
Thanks again to Adventures in Literacy Land for having me join you for today - it's been great!
Take Care
