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• Teaching adults to write to communicate

These resources are filled with activities and ideas that you can use or adapt. But navigating them can be tricky. So we designed a cheat sheet.

Cheat Sheet for Write to Communicate Activities

Here’s how to use it. Just look down the list at the second column. This tells you in one sentence what learners actually have to do in the activity.

From there, you can look at the name of the activity, find the page number in the resource, and see which progressions it lines up with.

Things to remember:

• Most activities cut across multiple progressions. This is fine. Just make sure you know what your focus is. Refer back to your learning outcomes.
• The level of difficulty for the activity depends on how you pitch it to your learners. That’s why there’s no list of which steps a particular activity applies to. For example, if you choose a text with easy words, it’s going to be steps 1 to 3. If you choose a text with more academic or technical words, it’s going to be steps 4 to 6 depending on the words.
• Not all the activities will be useful to you and your situation. If you do decide to take the time to look through these, you might want to rate them for yourself. In other words, can you use this?
• You don’t have to use these. If you have your own ideas then go with that. But remember, if you need inspiration or want to look at activities that were written by experts then look here.

You can download it here as PDF or just read below.

Activity	What do learners do?	Which progressions does it focus on?	Where do I find it?	Can I use it? Rate: ✓ ? ✗
Using a shared approach to writing	Work together with the tutor to brainstorm, outline, and draft a piece of writing for a purpose.	Purpose and audience, spelling, vocabulary, language and text features, planning and composing, revising and editing.	P. 28
Sharing quality work	Use a guide to evaluate a text in order to identify features of good writing	Purpose and audience, spelling, vocabulary, language and text features, planning and composing, revising and editing.	P. 30
Using writing frames	Use an outline with prompts to write a text	Purpose and audience, spelling, vocabulary, language and text features, planning and composing, revising and editing.	P. 31
Organising and linking ideas	Use a list of connecting and linking words to link sentences and paragraphs in a text	Spelling, vocabulary, language and text features, planning and composing	P. 32
Using templates and acronyms	Use a template or acronym with prompts for a piece of writing like an explanation, argument, description or discussion	Vocabulary, language and text features, planning and composing	P. 33
Shared paragraph writing	Work in groups to write paragraphs using prompts	Language and text features, planning and composing	P. 35
Word maps	Brainstorm and mind map other words that relate to a single focus word to extend vocabulary	Vocabulary, planning and composing	P. 36
Clustering	Group words into meaningful clusters	Vocabulary, planning and composing	P. 38
Structured overviews	Organise words into a hierarchy (e.g. like an chart describing all the roles in an organisation)	Vocabulary, language and text features, Planning and composing	P. 40
Clines	Arrange words into a sequence that shows shades of meaning (e.g. like words expressing temperature)	Vocabulary,	P. 42
Concept circles	Explain concepts and relationships that link related words	Vocabulary, Planning and composing	P. 43
Pair definitions	Write a definition and someone else has to guess the original word	Vocabulary,	P. 44
Brainstorming	Activate prior knowledge about a topic before writing	Vocabulary, Planning and composing	P. 46
Suggestions for teaching the writing process	A selection of activity ideas for teaching writing across the steps and progressions in the Write to Communicate strand	Planning and composing, revising and editing	P. 47
Suggestions for teaching spelling	A selection of activity ideas for spelling across steps 1 to 5	Vocabulary, Spelling	P. 48