Week 6-The Writing Process

Working as a Primary/One teacher provides insights into the learning process for many skills that adults who have mastered the entire process take for granted. Writing, for example, has many stages in a grade Primary and One classroom. Some students complete all writing through drawing pictures, others are generating their own symbols for meaning while others have mastered sound/symbol correspondence and are working on generating full thoughts with these symbols.
Writing is a complex and intensive process requiring the working of short and long term memory, fine motor skills and acute understanding of a variety of complex rules related to grammar, punctuation and sentence structure. For students, that are struggling with writing the process it is usually tedious, laborious and frustrating. Therefore, it is important for educators to identify potentially reluctant and struggling writers early on in order to provide intervention and support strategies to enable students to become effective writers.
Inspiration is a program that assists students with organizing their ideas in the first stages of writing. Through Inspiration students are no longer required to use their memory to recall symbol formation, or symbol identification (if pictures are used). The program also enables students to brainstorm the various ideas they have related to the topic they are writing about and therefore provides a way to later review and plan their writing sequence. Both Kidspiration and Inspiration have easy to use interfaces which allow students to stay on task. I believe the program can assist all writers in the Elementary classroom and not only those who are reluctant or struggling.