Helping Children to Develop as Writers: Supporting,Showing, Responding

How can we help children develop as writers once they have begun to master the complexities of the writing system and begun to understand how they can compose their own texts? Colin Peacock proposes some answers to these questions on the basis of a small-scale research project in one school. Key issues which emerged were the need to develop motivation, to give children opportunities to write, to respond to their difficulties and to show them what counted as success.