writing – Jane Farrall Consulting

The Importance of Keyboarding

Sep 15, 20241 Comment

A few weeks ago I was talking with a teacher – and she told me that she had a student whose parents didn’t want them to use a keyboard, which puzzled me. Keyboarding is a very important skill for all of us to develop. It is how we do a large part of our writing

Tools for Writing 2024 Style: A suggestion and selection guide

Jun 22, 20241 Comment

Learning to write can be really challenging – and teaching it can be really challenging too! When I started implementing Comprehensive Literacy Instruction, it was the area that I struggled most to implement. Some of the students I was working with weren’t able to hold a traditional pen or pencil – and some of them

Writing with All Tools Continuum v1.2

Jan 15, 2024

I’m very happy to let you all know that version 1.2 of the Writing with All Tools continuum is now available. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and suggestions for the continuum – please keep them coming!! The main changes for v1.2 are: The following documents have been updated for V1.2: The updated documents are

Flip Charts – An important Emergent Writing Tool

Oct 30, 20224 Comments

A long time ago, I learned about flip charts for emergent writers, thanks to Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver. Writing flip charts were first developed by Gretchen Hanser and staff at the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies Flip charts as a writing tool appealed to me for a lot of reasons. Firstly, because I

Writing with All Tools Continuum Webinar

Oct 21, 20226 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of running a webinar about the Writing with All Tools Continuum. The session included a run through of the continuum, a discussion of some of the documents supporting the continuum and a short moderation at the end. I’m delighted to share the video of the webinar, as well as the

Writing with All Tools Continuum – free online event

Oct 9, 202216 Comments

On Friday the 21st of October I will be running a free webinar on the Writing with All Tools Continuum: Teaching to the next level. There are 100 seats available at the webinar. If you’re interested in attending please sign up at https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/writing-with-all-tools-continuum-teaching-to-the-next-level-tickets-438462552297 Many of you will need to convert the times of the webinar

Developmental Writing Instruction: Writing assessment, development, teaching and learning. New Online Course!

Aug 8, 20212 Comments

I am delighted to announce a new online course focusing just on writing. This 8 hour, self-paced learning course is designed to provide in-depth information, knowledge, resources and support for helping every student to become a better writer, from the earliest emergent writers to conventional writers learning to write more. The course covers: Overview of

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

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