Our Academy intent is to enable all our pupils to write confidently, clearly and enthusiastically across a range of situations and curriculum areas. Our children will be able to understand the need for developing, organising and communicating their ideas effectively and accurately.

We enable our children:

Writing Pathway

We want to help all our pupils to develop into confident, creative and independent writers. We achieve this through the Talk for Writing approach, which we start as early as Nursery! It enables pupils of all ages and abilities to learn to write a wide range of stories and varying text types. The multi-sensory and interactive teaching activities used include:

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, including both fiction and non-fiction pieces. They then learn these off by heart and scrutinise with a writer’s critical eye.

They learn the underlying structures and the process of planning using story maps. They also learn about the key strategies for creating interesting characters and settings. 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.

Imitation and Immersion

Talk for Writing units begin with a hook which fires up the creativity and imagination of the children before they are immersed in the model text.

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 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. 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. 

Invention

During the invent 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.

Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling

Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling is taught through our writing approach. We interweave it within our teaching of different writing genres so our children can apply it in meaningful ways building on previous learning.

Spelling is also taught discreetly through the specific spelling lessons and interventions for targeted children.