The research studies children's syntactic and textual transformations in the latter stages of primary school. Previous research has established that children transform their writing in response to participation in ever-changing communication contents and in the school context, in response to reading and writing texts which represent the world relatively abstractly. While much is understood across disciplines about the broad differences between children's and adult's writing, little is understood about the linguistic and conceptual evolution of the 'synoptic' mode in children's writing and their 'interests' in representing knowledge and experience from this perspective.