Primary School - 13th January 2020

On Sunday, primary teachers received training linked to Talk for Writing, which will be used to teach English across the primary school from this week. Children will be working towards writing a story before the half-term break. Miss Alisha (Year 4) and Mr Matthew (Year 2) travelled to London before the winter break to visit a school where Talk for Writing has been used to great effect. They received training and then shared their findings with the other primary staff on Sunday.
 
In the first week, the children will be given a story writing task before being immersed in a text and getting to know it really well; they will use a text map with actions in class in order to learn the story. This will also be sent out as home learning with a copy of the story for you to read through with your children.




During the second week, children will look at a more detailed version of the story and compare it to the original story. They will take out key features from this version and begin to create a ‘writers’ toolkit which they will be able to use in their final story. Week 2 will be all about studying the more detailed text and making comparisons to the original story. The aim is that by the end of the week they will know the story really well, in addition to some key features they can include when they write their final story. During the third week, teachers will begin to plan and write each section of the story together with their children. While the basic structure of the original story will remain, the children will be given the opportunity to change aspects of the story to make it their own. During this process, the children will be given different targets and will learn to read over and check their own work for ways they can improve it.





In the final week of the process, the students will first write a draft piece using everything they have learned so far and the shared writing from the previous week. This draft will be checked together with the students, and they will be given individual targets to focus on for their final piece. This final piece will then be published in a special independent writing book. Children will be able to compare this work to the piece they created at the start of the topic to see how much they have learned and how their writing has developed. We are really looking forward to using Talk for Writing, and believe it will really help to improve the writing of students at NAISAK.
 
Primary English Team - Alisha Gardiner, Sami Siddique and Matthew Scragg