writing – Page 2 – Jane Farrall Consulting

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

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

ASSERT Communication and Literacy Conference 2017

Jul 23, 2017

In May I was lucky enough to attend the ASSERT Communication and Literacy Conference in Coventry in the UK. The conference ran for three days – and I promised I would share my presentations on my website. To those who attended – my sincere apologies that it has taken me so long to get this

Writing in Our Classrooms

Jun 22, 20153 Comments

Chloe re-writing a favourite book from Tar Heel Reader Writing is a complex task, involving ideas, language, words, spelling and transcribing or selecting letters. We need to teach all of these skills – and eventually students need to be able to do all of these, within the one task, to become writers. Overall guidelines Do

Keedogo & Keedogo Plus: Custom Keyboards for the iPad

Oct 26, 20145 Comments

Recently Apple released iOS8 – and once again there were a number of accessibility features added with this update. For a round up of accessibility changes and additions check out the excellent summary from AbleNet – iOS8 Accessibility. One of the new features is the ability for developers to create their own onscreen keyboards for