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Free professional learning11 short filmsabout an hour in all
Eleven short films on the NAPLAN narrative writing marking guide: one for each of its ten criteria and one on how the ten add up, each told through the guide’s own sample stories.
This first film is open to everyone. The other ten play a preview, then open with your email. It’s free.
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One for each criterion, in the guide’s order, and one on how the ten add up.
Open now Watched In the NAPLAN writing marking guide, a story about a lottery win and a story about a bus trip to outer space are each given twenty-nine out of forty-seven. The film goes through the ten scores behind each total: where one story is a mark ahead, where the other is, and where they are level.
Watched Two stories from the guide: in one, two friends find a box of gold, lose it to a bully and win it back with jet packs; in the other, a class goes on an excursion to outer space and nothing really goes wrong. One scores higher for Audience, and the film shows why through the guide’s three verbs: orient, engage and affect.
Watched One student’s story in the guide ends by waking from a dream; another does not conclude, and is marked higher for Text structure. The film follows four stories through orientation, complication and resolution, from a one to a four.
Watched A story that stays inside a small wooden box outscores, for Ideas, a story with a boat, a forbidden island, a pirate ship, a house out of nowhere and a treasure map. The reason is one word in the guide’s scale: elaborated.
Watched One student’s story gives its setting two words, “the City”; another lets us see its city, and their markers put the two stories three marks apart, out of four. The film goes up the scale on four of the guide’s own words: “only names”, a “suggestion”, “emerges” and “selected”.
Watched Three stories from the guide, and the words their markers picked out: a bus trip to outer space, a night at a hut on a hill and a warrior’s revenge. Low on the scale a marker can count the precise words; from a four, it is what the words are doing.
Watched A line in one student’s story says they got all of “them”, and the reader has to go back up the page to look for what “them” means. The film follows that linking through three stories, from a two to a four, with the four devices the guide names.
Watched In one student’s story a car leaves the road between two paragraphs: it isn’t written anywhere, it happens in the gap. Paragraphing is worth up to two marks, and the film shows its three scores as three gaps, in the markers’ own words: random, appropriate and deliberate.
Watched Two of the guide’s stories score a four for Sentence structure for opposite reasons: in one every sentence is correct but there is not enough variety; in the other the sentences are varied, with two errors and a missing word. Around them the film sets the guide’s three kinds of sentence and its whole scale, from a run-on at one to a six.
Watched Leave out too many full stops and a story can’t score more than two out of five for Punctuation, whatever else is on the page. The scale asks about sentence punctuation first and everything else after, and three of the guide’s stories show a two, a three and a five.
Watched In one of the guide’s stories the marker lists three spelling errors, and it scores three out of six; in another the marker lists ten, and it scores five. Spelling isn’t a count of mistakes: the guide’s skill focus is the accuracy of spelling and the difficulty of the words used.
A certificate Of the time watched, for anyone who would like one. It comes with free access. The NAPLAN writing marking guide gives a story ten scores, not one. Ten of these films take one criterion each: what the guide says the criterion is about, the scale it is marked on, and stories from the guide’s sample scripts with what their markers wrote about them. The eleventh sets two stories with the same total side by side, and goes through the ten scores behind each.
Each film runs for about five or six minutes, and the eleven together for about an hour. Every film has a handout to print, with stories from the film and, for each criterion, its scale. The films cover narrative writing.
For your class: the student NAPLAN writing videos. For the ten criteria with teaching moves for each: how to teach narrative writing.
Marks in all47
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