Intentional, explicit and scaffolded

What is it? 

The teacher uses this teaching strategy for students to learn new literacy skills and grasp key concepts. It is a powerful, and concise, segment of instruction time when the teacher demonstrates, models, and shares what the teacher is thinking.

What’s it look like? 

Explicit teaching for writing is a teacher demonstration of specific writing skills, strategies, procedures and understanding. Students observe as the teacher creates a text, listening to what the teacher is explaining and the thought processes the teacher is sharing while making decisions about the writing. 

Currently at Del Monte: 

Year 4 is focusing on informative writing texts, particularly explanations. Some components of our explicit teaching have included using a model text to scaffold the structural and language features of an explanation.    

Year 3 has been working on informative writing texts focusing on information reports about living things. Throughout some of the explicit teaching and learning experiences students have been delving into understanding the appropriate structural and language features to inform an audience. 

Years 1 and 2 are exploring the structural and language features of explanations. Students have focused on technical language, language to indicate cause and effect, present tense verbs and enhancing the complexity of their writing by implementing relevant adjectives and adverbs. Students have been focusing on using coordinating conjunctions to create texts that are organised into purposeful paragraphs with compound sentences that are informative and engaging. 

Kindergarten is introducing the concept of descriptive writing through their unit on Australian animals. Children are exploring adjectives, nouns, conjunctions and verbs to add specific detail to their writing. Students are also learning the importance of including punctuation consistently when creating their written texts. They are creating an animal profile using diagrams and key words, and then transferring this information into a writing scaffold. 

Prep has been learning about the letter ‘S’ and the sound it makes as part of their PreLit program. Students have been learning how to write the letter ‘S’ in both lower-case and upper-case form. The teacher modelled the correct method by explicitly showing the students to start at the top and work their way down. Following this, each child was invited to have a turn at writing ‘Ss’ on the interactive SmartBoard.

Reneé Andrews 
Acting Assistant Head of Primary