Video: Jointly Negotiated Sentence - Pollinators
In this video, a Foundation-Year 1 teacher is moving from oral language into writing through a negotiated writing lesson. The learning area is Science. The lesson follows on from previous lessons on the same topic. Previous lessons have included talk around activities about living things, and taking class notes. As can be seen on the board behind the teacher, the class has already jointly negotiated part of a text about living things. This lesson produces a continuation of that text.
This lesson demonstrates a joint construction of text with a high level of scaffold. In other words, the teacher is doing the scribing, and the students are contributing vocabulary and helping with the spelling. They will all read the text sentence once it is completed. This level of scaffold acts as a model for student independent writing later on, allowing students to participate in composing written text without the pressure of having to decode all the words. On its own, this high level of scaffold will not lead to independent writing. The teacher will use interim strategies, such as Shared Pen (See the videos Shared pen Group 1 and Shared Pen Group 2) as examples of writing strategies that move towards independence.
Key Takeaways
- Notice that the teacher refers back to the previously written text on the white board, so that students understand that this is a continuation of that text.
- Notice that the teacher negotiates the sentence with students before she moves to the white board to write.
- The teacher shifts back and forth from composing the sentence to the technicalities of spelling, finger spacing, and punctuation.