Preparation for Writing: Needs of Living Things - Worms
This is a video of a Foundation-Year 1 teacher preparing her students for a joint writing task. The learning area is Science. The students have been involved in activities to learn about organisms and their needs. The five needs are air, water, food, shelter and sunlight. As a class they have already discussed the needs, and looked at the needs of insects and flowers many times. They have a set of class notes which are on display, outside of the camera shot.
This is the final lesson before the teacher moves to a jointly constructed paragraph about the needs of organisms.
Key Takeaways
- Notice how the teacher moves back and forth from the generalised ‘organisms’ to ‘worms’. This is called ‘powering up, powering down’ from more technical terms to the concrete and back again.
- Note how the teacher response to student answers includes the vocabulary that she is teaching them about organisms and their needs. She will use this vocabulary often, and use prompts in the classroom so that they too can begin to use it. This repeated use of new language is known as ‘built-in redundancy’.
- Notice how the teacher prepares the students for writing by gradually moving students away from single word answers to repeating whole sentences with her. Her final oral rehearsal is the sentence that she has planned for the opening sentence of their jointly constructed paragraph to come. To survive and thrive, living things have five needs. It is a shift from ‘spoken-like’ language to ‘written-like’ language for two reasons. Firstly the new paragraph will include technical scientific language. Secondly, the clause of purpose beginning with ‘To…’ is foregrounded at the front of the sentence. This clause makes the sentence a complex, rather than a simple or compound sentence