Writing – Page 4 – Jane Farrall Consulting

Writing: It’s More Than Just Marks on a Page

Oct 28, 20195 Comments

Note from Jane: Thanks so much to Kayla McAllister, teacher extraordinaire, for writing this wonderful blog post focusing on one of her students. When I was in Year 7, I was awarded a prize in a book writing competition run by my school’s local council. The pride I felt on that night as the Mayor

Using the Developmental Writing Scale. #AGOSCI2019

Sep 1, 2019

Yesterday I was honoured to present again with Molly Sharp from The Grove Education Centre at the 2019 AGOSCI Conference in Perth, Western Australia. The Developmental Writing Scale (Sturm et al, 2012) allows us to track a student’s writing progress from emergent to conventional with a 14 point scale. Additionally, it is the first writing

Building Language Through Emergent Writing: #AGOSCI2019

Aug 29, 20192 Comments

Today was the first day of the 2019 AGOSCI Conference in Perth WA. It was an awesome day, starting with a very interesting (and awe inspiring) plenary presentation by Professor Janice Murray and then breaking up into a number of concurrent streams. I presented a workshop on “Building Language Through Emergent Writing” and promised the

2019 Literacy Intensive

Feb 11, 2019

Great news! The 2019 Literacy Intensive course presented by myself (Jane Farrall) and Dr Sally Clendon is now open for registrations! Details Dates: Monday 30th September – Friday 4th of October Location Currumbin Community Special School, Currumbin 5 Hammersford Drive, Currumbin Waters, QLD 4223 Cost $1600 (includes morning tea, lunch and tea/coffee each day plus

Tools for Writing: a Suggestion and Selection Guide

Jan 30, 201919 Comments

For many of the students I work with, some of whom have complex communication needs and/or relatively limited experiences of generating language, writing presents many challenges. To develop writing skills they need to learn to generate an idea, to think about language, think about the words, the spelling, controlling their “pencil”, etc. For many people,

Teaching to the Next Level: Using the Developmental Writing Scale to guide instruction

Jan 19, 20199 Comments

My last blog post was about “Using the Developmental Writing Scale for Writing Assessment”. This blog post is going to focus on how you can use it to help guide your instruction once you have used it to determine where your students’ writing levels are at! Just to repeat a little bit of information

Using the Developmental Writing Scale for Writing Assessment

Jan 7, 20195 Comments

In my last writing blog post, I talked about using writing data walls to keep track of whole school writing progress – and, of course, each and every individual student’s progress as part of this. The Developmental Writing Scale (Sturm et al 2012) is a key part of this. This scale is so useful as

Writing instruction and Data Walls: Focusing on ALL students at The Grove

Aug 23, 20186 Comments

In the third of my series of blog posts about writing, and working on helping all students to become better writers, I want to move away from individual writing development to a wider view of writing by talking about the benefits of a writing data wall. Over the last few years I’ve become a huge

Emergent Writing: Moving onto Form

Aug 19, 2018

It’s been a big time lapse (sorry!) – but this is the second of a series of blog posts about writing – and about assisting all students to become stronger writers. So moving on from the very beginnings of writing, let’s move to talk about the next stage. Early Emergent Writing: Moving onto Form In

Emergent Writing: Focus on Function

Apr 22, 20188 Comments

This is the first of a series of blog posts about writing – and about assisting all students to become stronger writers. Let’s start by talking about the very beginnings of writing. Early Emergent Writing: Focus on Function Mathilda is 17 months old. She loves drawing – and her parents are pretty happy when she