For the past year, writing has been a focus area for both staff and students in the primary school. Through building staff capacity in supporting students to develop the craft of writing we hope to empower our students to develop a love of writing and feel proud of what they compose. A sample of their recent writing can be found on your Parent SEQTA Engage portal. These can be found in the SEQTA Engage App by navigating to the heading called Assessments, then selecting Progressive Reports from this option.
Under the expert guidance of our Director of Humanities, Ms Elissa Strahley, and leadership of our Primary Director of Teaching and Learning, staff have engaged in a range of workshops which have focused on expanding the literary devices and techniques our students use to engage an audience for a specific purpose. With the right scaffolds and exemplar models, we believe all students can develop greater control over the power of language to impact, engage and build emotional connections with their audience. This has been further enhanced by embedding a focus on quality sentence writing across all curriculum areas.
The annual WriteOn Competition run by NESA provides students with an authentic opportunity to become published authors and showcase their incredible creativity. All St Columba students from Kindergarten to Year 6 have engaged in a series of class writing workshops to scaffold them through the process of writing a narrative. Through a focus on creativity, students have gained inspiration from peers and authors before creating their own novel ideas for their stories. Below is the stimulus for this year.
This competition has provided yet another opportunity for our students to develop their strength of character. Students have been encouraged to take a proactive stance in their learning by seeking feedback and reflecting on how they can improve to enhance their writing further.
The quality of our writing across the school is a testament to the hard work from staff and students with some highly engaging stories composed. All student’s writing pieces have been shared and we encourage you to celebrate your child’s writing success by asking them to read their stories to you.
