At Hadley Wood we want to inspire the children’s love of literature by developing their skills in order to become thoughtful readers and creative writers. Our mission is to enable children to immerse themselves fully into a text. They will broaden their speech and language, widen their vocabulary and further their understanding of the different text types. Every child has the potential to be creative writers and confident readers. Through Talk for Writing we want all children to be able to embrace literature in its many forms.
Hadley Wood Primary School implemented the Talk for Writing approach to teaching English in all year groups (from Reception to Year 6) from January 2021 in response to the Covid 19 Catch-up Curriculum. As a school, we identified that our pupils needed more opportunities to develop their oracy and love of language in order to increase their writing stamina. Below are more details about what this approach entails and why we adopted it.
Talk for Writing enables children to imitate the key language they need for a particular topic orally before they try reading and analysing it. Through fun activities that help them rehearse the tune of the language they need, followed by shared writing to show them how to craft their writing, children are helped to write in the same style. Schools that have adopted the approach have not only increased their children’s progress but have found that both children and teachers love it.
Talk for Writing is a cumulative approach that is built upon each year from Reception to Year 6. The teaching follows an underlying three-stage structure that is adapted to meet the needs of each year group. The three stages are as follows:
1) Imitation – the children learn a text and the language they need
2) Innovation – the children adapt the model text with ideas of their own
3) Independent application – the children create their own text using the language and skills that the model taught them.
The Talk for Writing approach was developed by Pie Corbett, an educational writer and poet. He is well known for promoting creativity in the classroom and has experience as a teacher, head teacher and OFSTED inspector. He regularly lectures on education around the world and the UK government consult with him as an educational advisor. We have adapted his approach to the teaching of writing to meet our own needs and have created our own tailor-made Talk for Writing approach.