Our Working Wall

When I first thought about reading 'Breathe' to the class I realised how well the story slotted into the Summer Term's Narrative work in Year 6. I haven't yet sat down and written my plans to promote the teaching of this yet and have instead decided to use the following three weeks to get a feel for the novel and the different approaches that I could take in promoting the writing of ghost stories with my class. Each lesson or idea has always been open to class discussion and we've explored different ways of making the unit and the reading of the novel as exciting as possible. I have found that asking the class to come up with ideas of how we could write great ghost stories has helped me shape up a few super ideas for this unit's work.

The several ideas that emerged, and of which I will post about over the next few weeks, are 'The Working Wall' (This was something I wanted to do and the children liked the idea of), 'Creating a Spooky Reading Corner' (This was their idea and something I liked) and having a creepy evening of storytelling (This is something I hinted at - the telling of ghost stories - and they took off in a direction that I did not seeing coming). As can be seen from previous posts, many other ideas and thoughts were explored too and some with emerge as time goes on. The one that I wanted to promote and focus on in this entry was the class 'Working Wall.'

The Working Wall is an idea that I have caught from a recent Literacy course in Oxford. Like many things, someone else came up with the idea and I then tweaked it to suit what I wanted to get from it. A Working Wall is there to support pupils' writing throughout a unit and is meant to grow and change as the weeks pass. The overall objective (to create a ghost story which has flashbacks) is always placed somewhere for all the children to see throughout the Unit and the Wall's main function is to act as a sort of 'workshop' where children can contribute their own ideas and thoughts about the processes involved in achieving the objective.

The Lancashire Literacy Team give an excellent explanation here. They separate the Working Wall into the following five sections:

* The Genre Checklist ( How to write whatever you're going to write)
* Gathering Content (Collating a bank of examples)
* Planning (Techniques demonstrated and used: mind maps, my Ghost Story Starts Game)
* Drafting (Demonstration and Support)
* Editing and Revising (My VCOP board can be used to assist here as well as in the Drafting process)

I like the fact that the Lancs team state that the Working Wall should not be seen as a 'tidy display' but rather a busy hive of thoughts and ideas. When I mentioned this to my class they became far more interested.

I had decided that the first phase of our work would involve no writing at all. Instead, we would read and discuss 'Breathe' as often as possible whilst exploring other good ghost stories. The latter part of this was started in the IT Suite where the children found stories online. They would then take the story and paste it into Word. From here they would highlight a phrase or passage that they thought would be useful to use in our own stories. They then used the footnotes tool to mark out why they liked those particular passages or ideas. Those that found the reading difficult, explored spooky images on the internet and use textboxes to explain why they thought those photos were good places to set their ghost story: all of this is there to help them prepare for the next phase in the Unit which is planning their story.

This element of research abd exploration into the genre is the 'Gathering Content' element of the Working Wall. With the online stories and images annotated and put up on the Working Wall, I felt we were making steady progress into the planning element of the Unit. With my 'Ghost Story Genre Checklist' and VCOP boards at the ready, we were going to begin using the creative-ghost-writing planning game (that was a mouthful) that I had created.

One of the things that the children were very interested in was finding local ghost stories. They had decided that this made the tale far more pertinent to them and that it would be 'spookier' as the location would help us become more attached to the tale. The following day saw lots of the children bring in their own ghost-story collections which we thought would be good to put on display around the Working Wall.