Margin Planners: Variety of Text Types

A quick and simple way of getting children to plan their writing and then use the plan when writing.

If like me, you find children in your class often write in sentences and often at length when planning. And if like me, you find that the children don’t look at their plan once they have written it and their writing does not then resemble anything in their plan. These resources will transfer your planning and writing lessons.

A child is given a strip which is stuck in place of the margin. They write in each box their ideas. As each box is only small, the children are encouraged to write notes.

When the children come to write the piece of writing they on the lines next to the each box so there is no need for the children to flip back between pages. Each paragraph then contains the information they planned for.

Text Types
This resource contains planning margins for the following types of writing:

• Diaries,
• Discussion texts,
• Explanations,
• Monologues,
• Newspaper Articles.