Eight out of ten for a story in the wrong tense
Anna, ten, wrote this for Flyers Reading and Writing Part 7. The three pictures showed a boy kicking a ball into a river, the boy looking sad, and a man reaching the ball with a long stick.
'Last Sunday I go to the park with my friend. We play football and my friend kick the ball in the water. He is sad. A man get the ball with a long stick. We are happy again.'
She covered all three pictures in about forty words. Her spelling is good - 'football', 'Sunday' and 'stick' are all correct - and her handwriting is clear. Her teacher plans to write the corrected version on the board, have the class copy it into their books, and give Anna 8/10 because the story is complete and easy to understand.
1. What is the single most useful thing to tell Anna about this piece, and what should be kept out of the feedback?
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The tense. Every verb is present simple while the story opens with 'Last Sunday'. That contradiction runs through the whole piece - go, play, kick, is, get, are - so it is systematic, not a slip. A Part 7 narrative is expected to be told in the past, and this is the one change that would lift the whole text.
Keep out of the feedback:
- 'Your spelling is good' as the headline. True, but it points her at the thing that is already working.
- Individual word corrections. Writing 'kicked' over 'kick' teaches nothing transferable - she will not carry one corrected form across to 'go', 'play', 'is' and 'get'.
- Anything about length. Forty words is fine.
The feedback should be one sentence she can act on: tell the whole story in the past, from the first verb to the last.
2. Why is the teacher's plan - copy the corrected version, award 8/10 - a problem?
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Two separate problems, one about method and one about message.
Method: copying produces a correct text in the book and no change in the child. It removes the decision from her, and the decision - which tense am I writing in - is the only thing being tested. She will copy 'kicked' without ever having chosen it.
Message: the content mark is defensible on its own terms; the story is complete and comprehensible, and the pictures are all covered. But presenting 8/10 with no named target tells Anna that the tense does not matter, which is the opposite of what the mark scheme rewards at this level.
A workable version: keep the credit for content, add one clear next step, and have her rewrite her own story rather than a model. Rewriting her own text is short, low-stakes, and keeps the decision with her.
3. Design a five-minute step to run before the rewriting, and explain what it is meant to change.
Read the worked answer
Verb sort, then oral rehearsal.
On the board, two columns: NOW and LAST SUNDAY. Take five verbs from the class's own weekend ('I go swimming', 'I eat noodles', 'I see my cousin') and move them across, saying each aloud in the past. Thirty seconds per verb, whole class, no writing yet.
Then Anna tells her park story aloud to a partner, in the past, before she touches her pencil. The partner's only job is to hold up a hand if a verb slips into the present.
What this changes: it moves the tense from a correction made after writing to a decision made before writing. Anna's problem is not that she cannot form 'went' - she almost certainly can - but that present simple is her default narrative voice and nothing in her process interrupts it. A pre-writing sort interrupts it once, cheaply, for the whole class.
How you know it worked: her rewritten story is in the past from the first verb, not from the third - and she can say why, in one sentence, without being asked.