The development of writing is based on a student’s oral language ability. Students first need to hear models of well-constructed stories, news and sentences. They then need to be able to organise their language, sequence their ideas and link elements together to tell a story before it can be expected that they develop formal writing skills. At this early stage of writing development, it is accepted that a student’s oral language ability will exceed their writing ability. It is therefore expected that a student’s writing may be more limited than what they produce orally. This program incorporates opportunities for students to hear and experience various written forms followed by oral rehearsal before commencing the written task. Pictorial and/or visual support has also been incorporated to support each of the text structures included in the resource.

First Writing Activities contains many genres including:

• Writing Words and Sentences – Label and Write, Simple Sentence and Building Sentence Tasks
• Writing Dictated Sentences – Writing a Dictated Sentence, Writing 2 – 3 Dictated Sentences and Writing 3 Connected Dictated Sentences
• Witten News – Object-Based, Activity Re-Tells and Event-Based News Tasks
• Story Retelling – Story Retell and Extension Tasks
• Generating Narrative from Picture Talks including Extension Activities
• Early Reports
• Poetry
• Personal Journals

For the junior primary years, First Writing Activities features:

• Designed by speech pathologists for students in the junior primary.
• A large range of writing genres are designed to move students from ‘role-play’ writing into early phonetic writing and finally into writing with emerging conventional spelling.
• Short pictorially supported writing tasks that involve an adult providing an oral model, along with opportunities for students to orally rehearse the sentence(s).
• Three levels of templates are designed to cater for the range evident in junior primary classes (i.e. the delayed, age appropriate and advanced students).
• Literacy, language and motor assessment points at the base of each template.

The programs within the range include:

• First Spelling Words – Set 1
• First Spelling Words – Set 2
• First Reading Words
• First Writing Activities

This resource is mentioned in the Foundation Teaching Sequence Manual on page 9 & 10.