Mrs O'Callaghan: Tuakana Teina writing sessions

Over the past few weeks, my Year 6 class has been working with a Year 3 class for writing once a week. We have been supporting each other during writing times to up skill and learn from one another. Both classes were taught some new sentence structures that they were to apply to their writing. To give our writing an authentic purpose, each student needed to come up with a creative menu using the new sentence structure : A 3 Ad and a question sentence. EG: Hot, spicy, tough - would you like to try it?

After several weeks working with their buddy, practising the new sentence structure, each student had to independently create their menus for a competition where two Year 3's and two Year 6's would be chosen as having the most creative language and menus's. Each student needed to present their menu to a group of 6 students (three Year 3's and three Year 6's). Each group then picked the best Year 3 and Year 6 menu to present to both classes to find the overall winners.

Was the Tuakana-Teina writing program successful and how do I know?

The Tuakana-Teina writing program was a huge success. Each student was both a teacher/mentor and a learner irrespective of age. They helped each other to learn the new skills that were taught and worked together to practise applying this to their own writing. The Year 6's and Year 3's were all paired up together and were given time to collaborate on their writing. They reminded each other about using correct surface features, neat hand writing, as well as higher level vocab. For the Year 6's it reinforced their learning as well as they now were responsible for being the teacher and teaching their Year 3 buddy.

Also, because we had a presentation/competition day where every student needed to present their menu, each student put in an amazing effort into their menu because they knew their peers would be judging it. Both written and visual presentations were amazing. The presentation day also helped ensure students met their deadline for completing their menu. It also improved the standard and quality of work by having an authentic audience and a purpose for creating the menu.

Over half of the students who made the finals were priority writers who were either current ALL students or have been part of the ALL writing program last year. It was amazing to see they were chosen by their peers as having some of the most creative writing out of the 60 students.

I also know that the writing buddy program is successful because student engagement, enthusiasm and motivation was high. Everybody was keen to share their writing and boys in particular created some weird and wacky creative menus.

Here are some photos of our sharing/competition day.

What next?

Because the creative menu writing was such a huge success, our classes will continue to do one writing session together per week. I hope to continue this program next year by getting more classes on board to work together once a week.

I believe that Year 6 & Year 3, Year 5 & Year 2, and possibly Year 4 & Year 1 would be excellent buddy classes for each other because their is a big enough age gap for the older students to be inspiring mentors, yet not too big a gap that the younger students wouldn't be able to do the work.