At Willow Green, we strive to help our children develop into confident and imaginative communicators, who are well-equipped with the basic skills they need to become life-long learners. Learning English is key in this. We aim to ensure all of our children develop a genuine love of language and the written word, through a text-based approach. Our aim is to provide children with key transferrable writing skills to build on year on year, that can prepare them for their education in the future. 

Teaching children to write for a range of purposes and audiences can be very exciting, especially here at Willow Green, where we provide children with a range of engaging hooks to capture their imagination! We aim to provide the children with varied reasons for writing and believe that this not only produces higher quality writing but allows our learners to apply their skills to a range of different contexts.

Oracy is prioritised in our writing curriculum in order to build vocabulary for all learners and increase understanding of trickier texts. Discussion, questioning and learning texts with actions all increase understanding and prepare our children with the tools they need in order to be successful in their writing. Our aim is for ALL learners to achieve their full potential in writing and we are committed to providing the scaffolds and challenge needed in order for our children to achieve this.

The writing curriculum at Willow Green aims to ensure that all pupils:

Talk for Writing

We want to help all our pupils to develop into creative writers. We achieve this through the Talk for Writing approach. Talk for Writing is used as a basis for how we teach writing across the academy. Children work on writing cycles writing both fiction and non-fiction texts across a range of genres.

It enables pupils of all ages and abilities to learn to write a wide range of stories and varying text types. Talk for Writing is an innovative approach to teaching writing. It was developed by the literacy specialist and writer Pie Corbett. It uses high quality model texts to introduce the pupils to different story/text types. They then learn these off by heart and scrutinise with a writer’s critical eye.

Additionally, children also learn about the key strategies for creating interesting characters and settings through a toolkit. They learn to use a range of sentence types and literary devices to create different effects including suspense or adventure.

Talk for writing has three key phrases, which work together to develop knowledge, confidence and independence in writing. The three stages are:

Imitation and Immersion

During this phase, the pupils learn the text using actions and story maps. The key to success for the pupils is that they internalise the text type through repetition and rehearsal. They explore the structure of the narrative and investigate the different characters, settings and events. They also begin to look closely at the language used and the effects this has on the reader. The pupils ‘read as a reader’ and ‘read as a writer’ during this process.

The children will begin to produce their own ideas through short burst writing sessions and create a toolkit of rules to follow for their own writing. The classroom becomes a dynamic, interactive resource filled with word ideas, sentence types and language tools collected by the pupils to use in their stories later.

Innovation

During this phase, the teacher and the pupils begin to change aspects to model the text using their own ideas. Following this, along with the teacher, the children produce a shared piece of writing that features all the good examples seen in the model text. They explore the text using different characters, settings or events and develop new ideas for descriptive language whilst sticking closely to the underlying structure.

It is during this phase that the pupils work using their toolkits. The toolkits, based on the features and ingredients of the model text, remind pupils of the different strategies they could use in their stories and helps them to see the progress they are making. It is during this phase, the teacher will model using the toolkit in their own writing, through shared writing. The teacher and class are actively involved in the shared writing process, where ideas, vocabulary, phases and strategies are vocalised. After the teacher’s modelled write, the children will begin their own writing. This part of the talk for writing is heavily scaffolded by the teacher through modelled writing, drafting, performance, peer support and oracy opportunities.

Independent and Invention

During the independent stage, the pupils plan and write their own story based on the text type they have been learning. They experiment with the ideas and begin to explore their own style of writing – they are able to do this by hugging the original model text tightly or they can develop in their own way – flying away from the text.

In order to develop independence, we have implemented a new structure that provides pupils with the opportunity to have more freedom and choice with their writing. The teacher, on occasion, may choose to skip the independent stage and move to the invention stage. An extra stage would then be added where the pupils will be provided with a stimulus, such as a short video, a picture or a story opening, and will then be allowed to choose one of the four purposes for writing (to entertain, to persuade, to discuss, to inform). The pupils will then plan their own piece of writing using a text map and will then independently create and edit a piece of writing.

The teacher may also choose to do this to extend high attaining writers by providing them with the opportunity to write at length, in a way that will stimulate their interests and creativity.

We believe that by providing this choice, it will further develop a love for writing and will also provide each child with a bank of truly independent pieces of writing that can be used for assessment purposes.

Grammar and Punctuation

Throughout the Talk for Writing cycle, we provide children with numerous opportunities to learn new grammatical skills in addition to embedding grammar and punctuation that has previously been taught. This is mapped out through both long-term progression plans and year group assessment documents to ensure coverage. We use the model texts to implement grammar rules, so the children understand the purpose of why those features have been used and the impact it has on the reader. The children can then refer to these as a base to edit and improve their own writing throughout the remainder of the cycle.  We have developed a Cold Task to Hot Task assessment tool specifically for punctuation and grammar that allows us to clearly identify areas in learning that children need to develop further, thus providing an individualised learning experience through jumpstarts at the start of the session.