How to Write What You Want to Say in the Primary Years

Young writers who struggle with putting their ideas into writing need language to help them. This book provides that language in the form of sentence starters and connectives. It also provides graphic organisers to help young writers organise their thoughts - a process necessary for good writing.
How to write what you want to say ... in the primary years: a guide for primary students who know what they want to say but can't find the words provides parents, teachers and young writers with a tool for improving writing. It is suitable for Years 2 to 6.

Catherine Black wrote the examples for this book getting some of her ideas from her son William's day to day schooling. How to write what you want to say ... in the primary years is slightly different from the previous two books in that this one contains graphic organisers and prompt questions to help students organise their thoughts for their writing.

Catherine Black is an independent literacy consultant living in northern New South Wales. She specialises in literacy in-service and resources for upper primary and lower secondary teachers of all subject areas. Catherine is a secondary teacher who has taught in Queensland, New South Wales and the United Kingdom. Catherine believes that literacy is integral to all subject areas. Her aim is to help middle and high school teachers, who traditionally have little training in literacy, to develop strategies to assist their students to come to terms with the literacy demands of their subjects. Catherine has a particular interest in the neglected literacy of Listening. She has delivered listening workshops at international conferences in Australia, United Kingdom and Austria. Catherine now works with Patricia Hipwell at logonliteracy.

Patricia Hipwell is an independent literacy consultant for her own company, logonliteracy. She delivers literacy professional development to teachers in Australia, and works predominantly in Queensland schools. Patricia has specialised in assisting all teachers to be literacy teachers, especially high school subject specialists who often struggle with what it means to be a content area teacher and a literacy teacher. Assessment has been an area of interest for many years and much of Patricia's work enables teachers to create assessment that is 'do-able'. Students often have very little idea of what they are required to do and rely heavily on parents/caregivers to assist them. The idea for this book came from the success of, 'How to Write What You Want to Say'; a middle years resource written to assist students who struggle with putting into words what they want to say, especially when the 'saying' involves writing. It has been Patricia's experience that students need help to develop the language that mature writers use. If we assist students with this in the primary years, they will be writers who are more confident when they enter high school. In this book, there are sentence starters and key connectives that students should use when demonstrating a particular writing skill. Language is the way that it is because of the job that it does, and letting students into the secret of this makes a significant difference to the quality of the work they produce. Patricia has developed a number of resources to assist students' literacy development. She is available to provide professional development to teachers to support the use of the resources, including this one that she recommends.