Writing at Randwick

You can make anything by writing – C.S, Lewis

At Randwick we strive to instill a love of writing through fun and enjoyable activities. We believe immersing students in topics, stories and places. You can only write effectively about what you have experienced and our writing journeys reflect this.

We use the talk for writing process to build resilient, successful and independent story-tellers. We focus on both oral and written pieces of work across a variety of both fiction and non-fiction genres. More information here (talk4writing.com)

Children are encouraged to magpie ideas from the best books to create their own story plots and characters. As children progress, they will increase their bank of writing skills and techniques. Lessons are exciting and engaging using multi-sensory methods to ensure that all children can access the learning regardless of age or ability.

We believe in reasons for writing and we never ask children to write just because… we write to real people, we persuade real people, we publish stories and do things for a reason!

The Talk4Writing Journey

Talk for Writing is an approach developed by the educationalist Pie Corbett. This is a powerful way of teaching as it enables children to imitate language, to develop their speaking and listening skills and to build their confidence. We start of our teaching with a WOW! This is to get the children inspired and excited.

The children then have a go at writing a story. This helps their teacher to see where they are with their writing and what to work on next. Then we read and write poems which helps the children develop the language they will need for the topic. The next stage is to learn a story. This is done as a whole class using a text map.

This is where pictures are drawn to represent parts of the story. In KS2 they use model texts rather than learning word for word stories as they are often much longer.

The children will work as a class to say the text using the text map and also using the actions for key words. At this stage the children will also do lots of different activities to get to know the story really well, for example drama, describing characters etc.

When the children are confident with the story, we move on to changing the story. We will box up the ideas in paragraphs to give the general theme like ‘main character sets off on journey’. Here you can see how reception adapted the ‘Enormous Turnip’ story.

We will then use the same structure but change some aspects such as the characters. As we write we use classroom working walls which are full of the elements of writing we are focusing on from adjectives to the correct use of a semicolon. (The progression maps below will let you know what skills your child will be focussing on each half term)

Then the children write the story in small groups with an adult or independently in KS2. Finally the children will plan and write their own version of the story applying what they have learnt.

We always do something with the stories, publish them, read them in worship, send them to the local community, basically anything to get our children's writing out into the world... the most important thing about stories is that there are read and enjoyed... we always have a real reason for writing at Randwick!

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