Teaching for Mastery in Writing: A Strategy for Helping Children Get Good at Words

Teaching for Mastery in Writing provides a practical approach to developing mastery in writing which helps all primary children to develop their skills and inspires a love of writing. This innovative book follows an approach that integrates mastery into existing teaching sequences – an approach which aims to improve the writing ability of all children, not just the more able. Writing is a tough discipline for children in today's primary schools. The number of skills they are expected to learn is a source of amazement to many adults outside education. It is no easier to teach, not least because of the many and varied demands on schools, including the National Curriculum, SPaG tests, assessment frameworks and inspections. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that teachers focus on helping children become the most effective communicators they can be through the medium of writing. Throughout the book, Mike Cain promotes the importance of a classroom culture characterised by focused talk and reasoning, and provides lots of ideas for challenging children in their writing through the development of key learning dispositions and critical thinking skills.

About the Author :
Mike Cain is deputy headteacher at St Thomas of Canterbury Primary School, in St Helens, Merseyside. He was a newspaper journalist and corporate communications specialist for 12 years before becoming a primary school teacher. He is passionate about helping children become the best communicators they can be, and aiding teachers and school leaders to develop English curricula that inspire and maximise progress. Mike has many years of experience as a class teacher, subject and school leader, local authority moderator and consultant, and is now in great demand in his part-time role as a private English consultant.

Review :
It's more important than ever that our children get good at words. The ideas in this book offer a strategy for learning to be good at words. Because just as with football and maths you can only get good at words if you practise, play, share, experiment and above all enjoy that richest of educational opportunities – failure. Even though this book covers the ways to teach mastery in writing at a primary level I believe it can be easily adapted to teach secondary students who enter the next stage of schooling and are not at the required level of writing at the time