“If they can't say it, they can`t write it’’ – Talk for Writing in Year 1.

We have just finished our first Talk for Writing project this year. The results?

When we looked at the final independent piece of writing the children created just before half term, it was clear that every single child made progress and that Talk for Writing is the right approach when teaching literacy in our setting. 

What is Talk for Writing? 

Talk for Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett, supported by Julia Strong. It is powerful! Based on the principles of how children learn, it enables them to imitate and learn the language they need for a particular topic, before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version. It’s basically about learning the model text almost by heart. The aim is for children to learn vocabulary and sentence structures they can later use in their writing.

Patience is key.

You can’t rush with Talk for Writing. Before we started using this approach for teaching literacy, we used to plan our topics around the character or book. Autumn term was usually about Percy the Park Keeper. We did fascinating and inspiring things last year; wrote Percy’s description, described Percy’s shed, went on a treasure hunt and again described chocolate coins. We wrote instructions about how to make jam sandwiches and hot chocolate. At the end of the teaching Percy’s topic, the children wrote a recount of the treasure hunt story. All this in just 8 weeks! In between, we introduced conjunctions, adjectives and question marks!

It was too much, too rushed, too stressful and also confusing for the children, who had just started their adventure as writers.

Decide what is your main teaching focus.

This September we still learnt about Percy, but instead of doing too much we decided to focus on the one aspect – a description.

Description of Percy.

We planned a sequence of lessons and created a toolkit for a description which children could successfully use while writing independently in the provision or during guided writing sessions.

We started by assessing children in the first week. They were asked to complete the Cold task. The children wrote a description of the chosen animal (picture). This exercise was utterly independent, although we delivered a brief literacy input focused on description just before the cold task assessment. 

What have we learnt from the Cold task?

We have learnt that children have almost no confidence when it comes to writing and that they heavily rely on adult support. We have discovered that the majority of our children can’t form a sentence and their spelling was quite poor.

All these observations, which followed after the Cold task assessment helped us to plan a sequence of lessons in which children could learn, practise and build on previous knowledge. We kept adding week by week, session by session. We had lessons about nouns, adjectives, conjunctions and sentence starters. We made a vocabulary mat.

The story path created by us and actions, helped us to learn a model text.         

                                                                                       

We had tried elements of Talk for Writing in the previous year with great success! It was obvious that this year there will be no other way to teach literacy and writing without Talk for Writing.

The Hot task children completed (entirely independently) just before half term and the quality of work, once again shows that this is the right approach as the children made accelerated progress in only 6 weeks!

It’s not always about being able to write well-composed sentences with the correct punctuation. For some children, progress was about building the stamina needed for writing or downsizing the letters and working on their formation. The progress was also about being a happy, confident and independent writer.

We had a reasonably able boy in our setting who couldn’t write a single sentence without being reassured about every single sound and word. This boy, by the end of our writing project, wrote – completely independent – a Percy description in which he included all the features he learnt; exciting adjective, conjunctions and his punctuation was almost spot on.

Another example is a girl who didn’t like writing. During the Hot task I couldn’t stop her writing! She decided that she will need to write a whole page. Even though her writing still needs lots of work and practise, the progress she made is incredible – she was persevering and it was a pleasure to see her as a confident and happy writer. 

And it’s not only these two children who caught the writing bug. Every day in our setting is about writing, the independent and 

child-initiated writing. Children produce a few pieces of writing every day, which the teachers edit with them.

I observed that some children, who initially struggled with the idea of independent writing keep coming back and revisiting the tasks which they found challenging at the beginning of the year. They try out themselves once again while describing a pumpkin or the Autumn weather.

We are looking forward to the next project – a set of instructions

about how to make jam sandwiches.

The children have already completed their Cold task and the “story” path is ready. We will use it, with the actions to help us learn the text and to construct a tool kit for the instructions.

We will let you know how it went.