The #WritingForPleasure Centre | Real-World Writers | The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing | How To Teach Writing | #WritingRocks |
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Free writing CPD materials - covering all aspects of writing teaching
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Recent feedback on Notebook Notions
'Reading this book has completely enriched my students' writer’s notebook journeys in the classroom… Sparking their creativity and confidence on the page has been amazing to watch! Thanks, Alan for your inspiration!'
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Just an FYI, children writing longer or more embedded sentences should not be confused with producing great writing.
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Excellent thread on the teaching of grammar, backed with key research from linguistics on Child Language Acquisition and from linguists working in educational spheres.
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This is excellent. If anyone wants to know why the SATs Grammar test is an utter waste of time, please read this thread.
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As a person who was only explicitly taught what an adverb was at university (while studying English Literature!) I couldn't agree with this thread more. There's a difference between confidently using grammar (in writing and speech) and accurately naming it.
12/ Starting from deficit ("they don't even know what a noun is") gets children and grammar off on the wrong foot.
Starting from expertise sets things up better: "you use nouns all the time; let's look at how you choose them."
13/ Every child in your class has been building a grammar since before they could walk. Our job is to help them notice it, name it, and use it with more intention in their writing.
writing4pleasure.com/2021/02…
11/ This isn't anti-terminology. Shared terms help us talk together. But the terms should name something children already do, not stand in for something they supposedly lack.
8/ So what does "doesn't know what a noun is" really mean? That a child can't name or spot one on a worksheet. That's a gap in their ‘structural linguistics’ knowledge, not in grammatical knowledge (using it).
10/ What does help? Myhill and colleagues found grammar taught in context, as choices writers make in their own texts, made a real difference. The use mattered most, not the terminology on its own.
journals.indianapolis.iu.edu…
9/ Mixing these up matters. Chn get treated as if they are idiots when they are anything but...
Labelling words gets mistaken for grammatical knowledge.
Andrews’ review finds little writing benefit from grammar taught as structural linguistics
bera-journals.onlinelibrary.…
6/ Berko's "wug test" (1958): show a child a made-up creature called a wug, then two of them. "Two wugs!" They treat an unknown word as a noun and inflect it correctly the first time they hear it.
britannica.com/biography/Jea…
1/ "Some children don't even know what a noun or a verb is!"
You'll hear this. It’s usually followed by a call for “going back to basics” and more grammar drills. However, it’s all a big muddle. 🧵…
See Dyson:
4/ By around two, children use sentence structure to work out new words. In Naigles's experiments, toddlers heard a made-up verb in different contexts and looked at different scenes depending on the grammar. That takes a working sense of how verbs behave.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2380…
2/ My daughter Isla-Scout is 15 months old. Her first words include: dog, hat, banana, Grandad, Tigger, go, this, no, again, hi, bye, oh dear. Things, people, an action, pointing, negation, recurrence, social routines. She's already sorting the world into words.
Everything Children Learn From Watching You Write: A Framework For Nursery And Reception Teachers
writing4pleasure.com/2026/06…
