Writing meaningful text: text features resources

Students identify and describe a local place they like to visit within a written report.

Students are asked to read a short story and to insert the commas and speech marks required to indicate the direct speech in the story.

Students read a story about rabbits and mark where the paragraph breaks should occur. The assessment focus is on organisation.

The assessment focus is punctuation with students inserting commas and speech marks into text.

Students read a short narrative recount and indicate each place in which a paragraph break is needed.

This task assesses students' understanding of the use of capital letters in titles, by asking them to read six book titles and put capital letters in the places they are needed.

Students read an essay on school uniforms then mark where the paragraph breaks should occur. The assessment focus is on organisation.

Students add commas to enclose words or phrases within sentences to show where extra information has been added.

This transactional writing resource requires students to express their views about organ donation.

Students write an argument either for or against daily physical education in schools. Support materials and links to exemplars for writing an argument are given under the "Working with Students" tab.

Students choose the most appropriate topic sentence for a set of supporting sentences.

Students identify the topic sentence, supporting sentences and summary sentence in a given paragraph. They then write their own paragraph, working to include these elements.

The assessment focus is on the features of an explanation. Students explore and write an explanation of the impacts the food industry could have on improving health.

Students write four questions about an animal they would like to research.

Students research and take notes in preparation for writing a biography of a famous New Zealander. Supports for this process and formative assessment points are given.

For this NEMP task students fill in a postcard about a holiday. Students' writing is assessed on postcard conventions, content, and legibility.

Students research and write a biographical recount on the life of a well-known New Zealander. Supports for this process and formative assessment points are given.

Students identify and insert the missing capital letters for proper nouns in a letter.

The focus of this resource is selecting the appropriate punctuation to end sentences. The resource ends with a shared activity where students write some sentences about themselves, share them with a partner, and give each other feedback on their punctuation.

The main focus of this task is punctuation. Students will read Janine's email to her new pen pal and insert eight question marks in the correct places.

Students first do the science activity Throwing Balloons 2 (PW2548) where they predict, observe, and explain what will happen when a balloon containing another balloon filled with water is thrown. Then the students do this writing task where they describe the balloon and what happened when it was thrown, and explain why they think it moved the way it did. Six annotated exemplars of student scripts (writing) are included under the "Working with Students" tab.