Story ending: Witch on a Broom
Near the start of a unit of work on fantasy stories, the class listened to the story Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. The teacher stopped the reading at the point where the broom had broken and all had fallen off it. During the reading, there were opportunities for partner talk about the characters and their feelings, which was further developed through drama improvisation to act out a possible solution to the problem. Nikita used the ideas developed in her group to write her ending. Children wrote on paper 'writing brooms' to produce a classroom display. The video clip shows how Nikita extended her writing with some teacher support.
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The dog found the fabulous wand and gave it to the witch and the witch cast a spell on the dragon and they flew off. The cat cast the broomstick spell. The broomstick was fixed. The friends flew off in a puff of smoke.
- In this piece, Nikita reverts to clauses with 'and', expressing her first idea about the solution as one complete thought (AF5 L1 b2). Her second idea about the cat casting a spell is written as three simple sentences (AF5 L2 b1).
- Clause structure and sentence punctuation are accurate, with prompting from teacher about full stops and capital letters (AF6 L1 b1 and b2).
- One action follows another in implicit sequence, assuming knowledge about what links the events together (AF3 L1 b2).
- Ideas are connected through repeated words relating to the fantasy world (AF4 L1 b1).
- The teacher prompts Nikita to develop her ideas, reminding her of predictions about the spell made in the course of the drama work. Nikita hesitates over writing 'they/it froze' and eventually writes 'they flew off', a thought elaborated on the second side. Description suggests imaginative engagement, for example 'fabulous wand', 'flew off in a puff of smoke' (AF1 L2 b1 and b2).
- The story ending is drafted as a series of statements (AF2 L1 b1).
- Some vocabulary choices are lively and in keeping with the overall theme (AF2 L2 b1).
- Spelling is mostly correct, including some common single-morpheme content words, for example 'spell', 'puff', 'broom'. Phonetically plausible attempts show some problems with vowel diagraphs, for example 'friends' and 'fabulous' and past-tense inflections, for example 'flew', 'fixed' (AF8 L2 b1 and b2).