COL Teacher Inquiry - Profiling: E-asstle writing with new entrants!

This week my class completed their e-asttle writing sample for term 1. 

They wrote a recount about going swimming in the school pool. It was interesting to observe the children's behaviour while they were completing their writing sample - this is not something that is recorded as a part of the assessment, but as a junior school teacher I always find it really informative (especially those working below a 1B level). I've selected two samples from my class to unpack in this blog post. 

Child A, has been at school for a term, has good phonological awareness and concepts about how written language works. I observed them say their sentence aloud before they began to write, sound out the words and attempt to write the sounds they knew. They knew where to start their writing and which direction to go. It was interesting to see how they recorded random sounds in the place of sounds that they didn't know. I knew this as  I got shouted at from across the room, "Mrs Kirby, I hear a /u/ sound... I don't know the /u/ sound...oh I'll just write a /i/". They were very aware that they needed finger spaces in-between words and used these correctly. They had an awareness of using full-stops at the end of a sentence. 

Their writing reads, "I am swimming at the pool. I am under the water." 

Child B, has been at school for four weeks. He is learning english as a second language and he speaks Filipino at home. He understood at the topic of the writing was swimming. He wrote his name correctly (for the first time independently!!). He began his writing in the correct place and wrote from left to right. It was interesting to observe him saying sounds and babbling away to himself as he wrote (I couldn't understand what he was saying). 

As a class, I observed my many of tamariki writing by saying sounds and recording letters onto their writing paper - most understand the directionality of writing, that words are made up of sounds and our writing is a way of sharing our ideas. All of my tamariki are emergent writers working at a PRE - 1B curriculum level. 

I am interested to see how an increased phonological awareness (hearing the sounds in words)  and the use of a structured literacy approach will impact my tamariki's achievement in writing as the year progresses.