Our Autahi students are just beginning to explore the craft of writing. Writing is like juggling, requiring us to perform a number of different actions, all at the same time (and keep smiling!). We are using our fine motor and letter formation skills to write letters. We are making word and sentence choices, thinking about spelling and punctuation, while monitoring the ideas we want to convey. And the whole time, our executive functions are in play, checking what we've written, revising, considering our audience, self-regulating. It's a miracle we manage to get anything down on paper at all!
Learning to do all of this is no small feat. It's vital that we never lose sight of the fact that writing is a creative act.
Writing collaboratively gives us a chance to build texts together. We can share ideas and help each other to find the best words possible to express them. We can also share the load of creating a longer piece of writing, such as a poem. Writing with each other in mind also lends our writing an extra level of meaning and purpose.
This is the story of how we made a collaborative poem together.
Our 'Morning Sounds' poem was inspired by Quentin Blake's picture book 'Mrs Armitage on Wheels'. Towards the end of the book, Mrs Armitage has a mishap. Blake uses a whole collection of noisy words to tell us what has happened to her.
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This prompted us to explore onomatopoeia and sound words. We read Roger McGough's 'The Sound Collector', which is packed with sounds. We did some listening and observing in our own environment, too: what sounds could we hear in and around Autahi? We started try out some sentences by telling each other our ideas and collecting useful words in a word bank.
Inspired, we began drawing and writing some of our ideas.
It was clear that many of our ideas had to do with the morning, like the crunching of breakfast cereal and the tweeting of the birds. Each person picked out a sentence and rewrote it. Then, we assembled the sentences into our poem.
