Giant stories

A class of five year olds have been given the task of designing a giant and writing a story about it. The class teacher and teaching assistant support them with their task.

Good for looking at

• Motivation
• Early literacy
• Writing
• Making up stories
• Mark making
• Drawing
• Imagination
• Effective practice

A class of five year olds have been given the task of designing a giant and writing a story about it. The class teacher and teaching assistant support them with their task.

Notice

• What are the children are interested in? (Look out for non-verbal and body language as well as spoken language)
• How are the children learning? Which areas of development, engagement and characteristics of learning can you observe?
• How the adult initiated activity support the children’s learning?
• In what ways do the adults support the children’s learning?

Reflect

What are your thoughts about:

• How and what were the children learning?
• The children’s levels of involvement? How engaged were they in this teacher initiated activity?
• The role of the adults in this interaction – how did they support the children?
• The value of this type of activity for the children?

Respond

What would you do to:

• Support the individual children’s interests and encourage their motivation for writing stories?
• Encourage the use of dictionaries and other methods of checking spelling?
• Sensitively extend their learning further?

What next:

• Do you need to encourage more of this kind of imaginative story telling and character creation in your setting? How could you inspire the children? Do you know what they’re interested in and what will get their imaginations going?