Predictable Chart Writing
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  • Day 1
  • Day 2
  • Day 3
  • Day 4
  • Day 5
  • Other learning opportunities
    • Presentations
    • Online learning & CCN
    • Planning docs

Predictable Chart Writing
​ for Students With Significant disabilities

What is it?
Predictable chart writing is a week-long activity that usually follows this pattern:
Day 1: Write the Chart
Day 2: Re-read the sentences
Day 3: Work with the Cut Up Sentences
Day 4: Be the Sentence
Day 5: Make the Book

Gretchen Hanser, OT, developed this idea of predictable chart writing based on work by Cunningham, Hall and WIlliams, 2001. “Predictable chart writing is a fun and easy, shared writing activity that supports emergent and conventional writers and readers. It is a way of providing some structure, while allowing students to generate their own ideas.” (Hanser, 2005). At it's core predictable chart writing is an opportunity to build:
  • Motivation to communicate, read, and write
  • Communication, language selection, and choice making
  • Understanding about Concepts of Print
  • Models of the writing process and early writing sentence structure
  • Sight words and high frequency words (names, Dolch, Oxford, Core Vocabulary)
  • Word identification, spelling, capitalisation, and punctuation (for transitional and early conventional readers and writers)
  • Repeated reading experience for conventional readers developing fluency
  • Self-confidence and image of self as a reader and a writer “I can read! I can write! I can share ideas” (TalkLink 2017, Sheldon, 2016, Hanser, 2005)
Mary Louise Bertram writes: Predictable chart writing supports all our students to become communicators, readers, and writers, including our earliest communicators through to our conventional writers. Predictable Chart Writing is a valuable daily instructional routine.
Predictable Chart Writing provides a consistent daily structure and allows students to contribute to a group activity as well as complete independent work.
Adults model each step of the process, including demonstrating how students can generate ideas using speech, objects, or symbols on their AAC. Predictable Chart Writing gives students the opportunity to see writing every day, for real reasons.
A number of different activities occur during the week long process of Predictable Chart Writing. The end result is a valued class book which every student has contributed to. This book is read often and is displayed in the classroom library. 
I'd like to thank Gretchen Hanser, Karen Erickson, Caroline Musselwhite, Erin Sheldon & Mary Louise Bertram for sharing their expertise with the world and our students and children. I am grateful.
predictable-chart-writing-overview-2020.pdf
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File Type: pdf
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predchartwriting.pdf
File Size: 212 kb
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From Mary Louise Bertram on Jane Farrall's site:
copy_of_teacher_tips_for_predictable_chart_writing_2_page_version.pdf
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"Remember to read the Chart throughout the day at incidental times, not just at ‘Predictable Chart times’. We are aiming for the students to have heard these sentences at least 20-40 times by Friday. We want them internally reading along with us and knowing how these sentences sound." -Mary Loiuse Bertram
This site is a work in progress and has been a group effort involving many talented clinicians and consultants. It is happily maintained by Toby Scott, teacher & Assistive Technology Specialist, Edmonton Catholic School District.