Computer room lesson 9th/12th Dec - children's writing

Year 5: Naeman Abercrombie: Garden Birds (originally untitled)

The <reg>survey</reg> above was done in my back garden in the morning, after putting food out on the bird table and on the floor by the bird table. I <reg>watched</reg> for 45 minutes each time recording the number of each type in the period I watched so the same bird may be counted more than once. The chart shows starlings and house sparrows were the most frequent visitors as 178 out of 247 were these. A green wood pecker was the most <reg>unusual</reg> visitor during the <reg>survey</reg>, but I have had <sic>Heron gulls</sic>, pheasant and a sparrow hawk in the garden last winter.

Year 6: Naeman Abercrombie: Trains

Railway companies built their railways <sic>with in a haphazard way</sic>. Eventually, larger systems meant that different companies joined up. These large companies were London & North <reg>Western</reg> Railway, The Great Western and the South Western Railway company. The Great Western had an engineer called Isambard Kingdom Brunel designing its railway tracks.

All the railway companies wanted to be the best. Brunel thought that trains were safer and more comfortable if they used broad <reg>gauge</reg> rails. These rails were seven feet and a quarter inch apart and were wider than those used by the other companies. They used <reg>rails</reg> that were four feet eight and a half inches apart. Everyone wanted the trains to use the same gauge. Parliament had to sort out the problem. Parliament passed the Gauge Act which said that all tracks had to be four feet, eight and a half inches wide.

Analysis:

As you can see there is a clear improvement from the writing Naeman has written in year 5 from the writing they have done in year 6. In the first piece of text you can see that they are writing really long sentences and are mostly consisting of statements. In the second piece of writing you can see that their writing is more concise and their sentence control has improved. In the second piece of text the student makes fewer mistakes and a range of sentence starters. The level of punctuality on the other hand as stayed the same as there is no progression to the use of exclamatives, semi-colons or added information that been incorporated within brackets. In the first text there is emission of some of the punctuation however, in the first one, punctuation is used more frequently but the level of punctuation hasn’t changed.  Simple things like the title have been elided from the first text as the child hasn’t included a title for their first piece of text.