Building understanding

Writing: Festive cards

Secondary

Communication and language

﻿Hello there everybody? It's good to see you all. My name is Rae and today we're going to be looking at some greetings cards. For the grownups, we'll look at the conventions of writing greeting cards for different festive occasions. And we'll also encourage the children, the learners to make marks of four letters that are relevant to them and also to these special occasions. So I hope you enjoy. Before we begin, let's take a quick look at the things we might need. For this lesson, you will need relevant symbols and signs and some materials with which to make marks. So that might be some paint. They might be pens and paper. It might be custard and food colouring, anything that is going to motivate movement, you will know what's best for your child. And potentially something to make marks on piece of paper or something to print from once the children have made marks on other surfaces. It might also be nice to have some greetings cards and thank you cards or Christmas cards or whatever it is that you have to hand would be lovely. So let's next, take a look at how we're going to get the room ready for learning. Getting the room ready for learning. I would recommend reducing distractions within the room. That might mean closing the curtains so that we can't see the streets outside. It may mean turning off a fan. It may mean turning off an overhead lights or the television. But as well as preparing the room, we must prepare the children to be ready for learning as well. Some children will require a run around outside first to exercise their hands maybe to begin. Perhaps a snack, perhaps an opportunity to change position, to take splints off of whatever is the best position for them to be learning. You will know that best. Really important to create some interests, that curiosity and anticipation for the child, by sharing the resources that you've gathered together, talking about what might happen, show the excitement. If you model how excited you are to begin, then that will be infectious. And the child would be really interested in the lesson coming up. So press pause while you get the room ready, make sure that you take the opportunity to prepare yourself as well and we'll begin very shortly. Let's begin by exploring cards. There is something that they all have in common. There's a few things they all have in common. They're made out of paper or cards. Some of them are shiny on the front. They usually have different colours. They fold in the middle to create two equal halves. They ordinarily have writing on them and pictures. And you can find them at card shops or supermarkets. To do a thorough explanation, it would be wonderful to take a trip out and go to a card shop and choose your own greetings cards with which you can then write your name and make marks later on and continue this lesson. However, if you don't feel like doing that, and that is absolutely fine, a simple piece of A4 paper folded in half will do. Or if you have some envelopes in the house, that would be great too. So I'm going to show you what I've got and how I'll execute it, let's take a look. Okay, let's take a look at what we will do to explore greetings cards. So if you've got greetings cards in front of you, that makes life a lot easier. I haven't been down to the shop to buy anything new. So we're going to use what I have here in the house. So we'll begin taking a look at the front of the envelope, where somebody has written a name and also put a sticker as well. So can we look closely? It says, Rachel, so this card must be for Rachel. Let's take a look inside as we open up. The back of the envelope and look, there's something inside. So I might encourage the child to reach in, oh, it's a bit stiff, and pull out the card and look nothing else inside. Encourage them to put their fingers in. It's a nice thing to explore that enclosing side of things. And look, on the front, there's a picture of a butterfly and some flowers. And then we open it up. Just like a book, and there is some writing inside and it looks like it says the same name at the top and then love from at the bottom. And it says who it's from in this case, it says grandma, and there's a whole bunch of writing. So if I was to be reading this through with the child, I would go following my finger one side to the other and we would read it together. And if the child can follow with their finger, that would be lovely. And then we get to the end and we say who it's from, a couple of axes, couple of cases at the end. And then we close it up. Then we can put it back and we can put back inside the envelop. Trying to figure out which way is best. That doesn't work. We can't close it. How about, like this? Half of the fun is already gone with this envelop. Because once upon a time it has already been open. So let's have a look at one that's been prepared earlier. So on the front, we've got a name written, in this case, it says Misty and the unbelief is sealed at the top. So what we're going to do is we're going to open it and this is the fun bit. Find a little tab like this. It's a good sound, listen. It's not quite, there we go. And inside is something else. Now, somebody has drawn a card and has folded it and written some words inside. I put it upside down. There it is. So with your child, it doesn't matter if you don't have greetings cards and envelopes lying around, that's not a problem at all, you can always do what's been done here and just fold a piece of A4 paper and colour in make marks on there. So I wonder what we should do next? Okay, this is not a massively comprehensive list of all writing skills. It doesn't necessarily indicate the progression. It isn't necessarily a complete or the best list you could find. But for our purposes today, it will be useful to reference. I think it's critical really that we know where the child is at. So we know how to appropriately challenge them to be making progress in this area. And oftentimes we can talk about writing skills and people say, well, you know this child doesn't have intentional movement. So, what's the point in writing skills? But of course writing requires movement. So the first thing that we should be doing is motivating movement. If that is initially reflects movement, that's fine. That's your level one, step one towards writing. So if a child has reflex movement as in they may withdraw from something cold and wet, or they show that they have a particular response to sort of a scratchy dry stimulus, then start there by motivating movement. Even if it's reflex movement, that's ideal, that's exactly what we want. You can use co-active movement. So if you support the child's elbow or just underneath the hand or underneath rest, then we can make those letter shapes together. If that's an appropriate thing to do with them. If the child has intentional movement, but isn't necessarily making marks intentionally, then what we're looking for is the cause and effect relationship between all that to me making that mark, that's me. If when I sweep my hand across the table like that and enjoy that movement, this is the mark that is made as a result. This is what's created on the table. The next step might be the intentionality. So perhaps sticking a finger in a paint pot to then, put that finger elsewhere to notice the effect that they're making. Or it could be that a child begins to make marks on the paper using different materials. And that's great. We may also get to the point and this comes at different different levels with different children, where they realise that words or letters or symbols and signs and shapes, conveyor meaning. So some children might find fascination with written word. I don't know this Steinway text, that's on the piano, above the keyboard or in an advertisement rather than looking at the pictures. They seem to be following the words. And that fascination comes at different levels for different children, but seems to suggest that there is this understanding that there is a meaning behind that text. The children may also begin to copy you. So they may copy that motion. When we're writing and we do this and that the child may then pick up a pen or a paper or whatever, and sort of mimic that, it's also like a play mimicry behaviour. Or it might be that they're actually copying what you're doing and can overwrite perhaps or mimic the letter shapes that you're making. They may also create pseudo writing. So these little shapes might make from left to right in the same way that we would write on a piece of paper, left to right or if it is traditional or convention in the language that is the first language at home, it could be the other way, a text moving in the other direction. The fundamental shapes of letter formation is what we're going to look at next, circles, waves, sticks. So if a child isn't currently forming letters and isn't necessarily developing the grapheme phoneme correspondence, then what we need to be looking at is the intentionality of making marks that have shapes that will be relevant to letter formation later on. And after that point, children can start forming meaningful letters, can form that grapheme phoneme correspondence and then begin putting them together in order to make words or identify words based on their initial start sound. So we're going to take a look in a moment at those fundamental shapes for mark making letter formation, get your messy materials out, get your paints at the ready, 'cause this is what it's going to look like. Okay then let me demonstrate to you a range of different ways that you could be mark-making for assigning your greetings cards. We'll start with the most fundamental level of mark-making, which is intentional movement. So if you are working with a child who has a limited range of intentional movement, then we could place the hand underneath this and make those marks using big gestures. So if we're doing circles, we could go around. If we're doing lines, we could go backwards and forwards and side to side, and you're motivating that movement. Now, at this point, we're not making marks on anything and that's fine, but getting that movement started is crucial. So once you've done that and you've got the body going, we can then motivate it to be a little bit more independent. So in my baking tray here, I've put some chia seeds, 'cause it happens to be what I have in the cupboard right now. It might be lentils, it might be beans or jelly or dried peas are good as well to motivate movement. Spaghetti, if you like it to be messy. And then as, I'm hoping I can show you, can't read it. As you move through, of course you're making marks in that stint as you just about see it there Connie, so that you're creating the lines or the circles and it doesn't have to be permanently. It doesn't have to be on a piece of paper. It doesn't have to be the principal. It's just about making those shapes and starting to make marks and realise, well, that's me that did that. It's a cause and effect relationship. So if we have that and if this is a paint or a mess system is by all means print a piece of paper, press down a piece of paper on top of it so you can take a look at that afterwards. So if we have that, we have the movement, we're making marks and really motivating stimuli. If we have all that and we want to take it to the next step. We could potentially look at some letters. I've got some magnetic and cardboard like is here, with all sorts of different stripes and colours. It's not ideal for lots of recognition, but it is useful for shapes. So we could be using these to print in that messy stimuli to move around. We could also simply use a pen, if a child is happy to hold a pen, we might start off like this. We might then encourage them to hold it like this. You might get inverted as well. And then eventually we're moving into the handwriting grip. So whoever your child is holding an implemented pen, a paintbrush, however it is whichever hand they're using, do encourage them to move from this, to this, to then holding it as we would hold a pen. We can be mark-making on windows with a white board markers that wash off, you could mark making on paper, you could be mark making on the table with your whole arms or maybe your legs as well, and then be printing from that. On another level, we also have have paints, which I would really encourage if you are looking for letter formation, have the child do those gross motor, really big movements first. So there's my letter a and then bring it down into maybe using a finger and then bring it down into using the pencil. So the list of writing skills, I've included that I hope would be really helpful for this. And I hope that I've demonstrated in some way, some things that you could do with paints, with pens, with different stimuli and in different ways. The other thing I might recommend is if you do have a child who is using a pen on paper is before you go, so we might be doing all of these things. You might be doing a circle and a wiggle and a couple of lines. If they are doing making these shapes and the interested in writing, then have a look at the left to right convention. So a child might be making all sorts of wiggly, almost like pseudo letters. And this is a wonderful exercise because we've got a fundamental writing skill there, which is forming shapes also in the right way. So they're going from one side of the page to another, in a line. So if we have this, but we don't have an accurate, that's fine because this is a slightly separate skill, but it's still under the same umbrella. If we are forming letters, some children like to write over the top of yours so that they can give this a similar shape. They might like to write over the top of a dotted frame. You can't see that very well in the light, so that they can follow a dotted frame. Or it might be that they just wish to be completely independent with the whole thing. If they are wanting help with holding the pen, of course you could hold it with them initially to motivate those movements and then let go so that they can continue by themselves. So I hope that all of that is really helpful. I hope that you give it a go. Do you have a look at the recommendations, how to extend this learning further, and all the best. So remember we could be making these shapes with gross motor movements. So supporting a child by the elbow, under the arm, under the ankle, maybe to make big sweeping movements with the body, or it could be that the child is using a pencil grip and is making these marks on paper. So it is really hugely easily diversified this activity. So here we have circle light and squiggle fundamental shapes if you rearrange these you might see a or D and M or the rudimentary shapes or the D and to M. But let's take a look at the next one. So let's circle line squiggle. Next one's different, squiggle circle line. It is different, but they're the same shapes. The squiggles turn the other way, but we've still got circle on the line, looks a little bit different. Practising , practising , let's see what's next. a squiggle that's slightly slimmer and taller and three parallel lines. Wow, some very, very different shapes. We've got a zigzag with straight lines, and then we have some loops that crossover. All of these shapes are simply fundamental line movements or hand movements gestures that might help children begin to develop the fundamental shapes that will be needed for writing. This final one here with the zigzag and the loops are there to encourage the children to form something slightly different. So if we've done squiggled circle, line, lines, circles, squiggle et cetera, et cetera, and we come across to this, this is different, can they also trace these different shapes with a pen or pencil or finger or their body movement, just as an extra challenge. There is already a lot of scope for differentiation, for variety, for extending and reducing the stretch in this lesson already. However, as always to make it easier, repetition, repetition, repetition, and drama use big dramatic pauses and silences of build anticipation in the play that you are engaging in. And the more familiar something is, the more likely you have that room within it to push for progress. You said big whole limb movements to make marks and sweep across a large surface, like a tray or a table and use the things that are the most motivating for the child. In order to make it hard, to look through that list, that number list of writing skills and challenge the child to push further. Do you be aware of the way that we're gripping pencils or gripping pens might make equipment and challenge the fiscal grip on it as well. And as always larger movements to smaller movement, smaller movements are always going to be harder. So if it's much of moving limbs, rather than moving fingers, then go for that too. Apply these writing skills to new activities once you've been practising them. So rather than doing greeting cards or mark making on the table, why not write a letter to a friend. There are different purposes for writing, and it's really important for children to explore that. I could also explore the other festivals in other cultures or the countries, through exploring the food and the clothing, the music that's listened to. If you are in a culture that celebrates one particular festival and not another, it might be worth having a look and seeing other people's ways of celebrating as well and things that they might write cards for. So I hope that you've enjoyed it. It's been a joy to work with you and I'll see you again. Thank you everybody for joining me for this lesson. It's been good to have you. I encourage you to look at see different ways, which this learning could be extended so that you can make the most of the opportunity. I look forward to seeing you again, but until then, goodbye. If you would like to share photos and videos of your child's work with us, then please share them via Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and tag us @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

Writing: Festive cards

Writing: Festive cards

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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