Jane Farrall Consulting

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

Making Word Wall words in Boardmaker

Jan 2, 2019

Yesterday I published a post with a bunch of new word wall words as Boardmaker files. Keren made a comment that she had been trying to make her own – and that reminded me that a few people (especially Emma from Bullimbal School) had been asking me to make a “how-to” video. So – here

Word up – 2019 is here and we’re going to the wall!

Jan 1, 20193 Comments

Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2019 has lots of great times in store for you all 🙂 I’m going to take a break from my string of blog posts about writing and add to my previous blog posts about the word wall that I published in February 2017. The first blog post was

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, 20187 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

Phenomenology and AAC: Learning from people who use AAC

Apr 18, 2018

Two years ago at the ISAAC Conference in Toronto I attended my first ever presentation about phenomenology. A phenomonological approach is where individuals tell their stories to make meaning of their truths, realities and experiences. Phenomenology then allows researchers to interpret the meaning of the experiences through hearing and observing the words and descriptions of

Literacy for All: An Introduction to Balanced Literacy

Nov 5, 2017

Upcoming Adelaide Workshop 23rd of January, 2018 8:30am to 3:30pm The Grove Education Centre 39 Leslie St West, Woodville SA 5011 Workshop Description Including the diverse range of students in special education settings in a literacy program can be extremely challenging. This presentation will outline a balanced literacy approach that can be used with ALL students to actively intervene