I often hear teachers complaining or just plain confused about why students don’t transfer what they learn in one context or lesson to their performances in another. They have taught something in grammar (e.g. dependant clauses) or spelling (e.g. letter combinations that make the long a sound), students have practiced the skill and been tested on their words but see little or no transference to their own writing.
Well perhaps the question might be rephrased to – how might we scaffold the transfer specific skills taught in grammar or spelling into student writing?
Here was one such example a teacher “pulled” from the web that she used as a model in her class.
What this example, which was used a model for their work around dependent and independent clauses, did was that it enabled our year 6 students to start to recognise the grammar (clauses) in their own work. This self-identification shows a such a transfer is possible.
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