Literacy Resources

We talk a lot about working walls and model them on our talk for writing training so it is fantastic to get some feedback from teachers about what they are doing in their classrooms.

A working wall is a temporary display for any or all curriculum areas that shows the build up or progress towards an outcome. It is not a neatly presented, double-backed display but an ‘in the moment’ display captured whilst working, that becomes a scaffold for children and an explicit visual support of the journey. In literacy, by the time the children get to the writing stage there will be many supports for the writing on the working wall and teachers will be modelling how to use the ideas and practises that have been generated.

I particularly like this series of images because they show so clearly the place of talk for writing in the teaching sequence.  Can you spot the story-mapping, warming up the word and the support from visual images?  They also take the children through the stages of imitation and innovation.  So many children need to linger longer in the imitation phase in order that they embed the language patterns and start to find their own voices.  Children will then naturally move into the innovate and finally invent phases.

When talking about book displays in  The Reading Environment, Aiden Chambers states

they deeply influence the mental set of the people who see them.

I see no reason why working walls should have any less of an influence.

Our thanks go to Mark Cole at West Croft Juniors for these wonderful pictures of his working walls linked to talk for writing. It would behard hard not to succeed at writing in this classroom.

Which aspects of talk for writing have had the most impact upon your children’s writing?

I am a big fan of found poetry and have suggested it as an activity several times on this blog.  On Wednesday I read Andrew Motion’s recent found poem An Equal Voice created from a variety of sources.

Found poetry allows us to magpie (I know it’s not really a verb!) words and phrases from other writers and to put them together in our own ways (usual words in unusual combinations).  It is a very supportive way of creating powerful poetry with children whose own vocabulary might be limited.  It allows them to roll the language over their tongues to see how it fits and eventually, if it is  said and read enough, the words and phrases become their own.

Found poetry can be created from fiction and non-fiction texts equally well and can be derived from one source or across a range of sources and can therefore be cross-curricular.  They can be created from speeches, letters, scientific and research papers, road signs, adverts, websites and picture books.  In fact anything that has words can be used.

Here’s a found poem derived from this post.

Lost and Found

Magpie.

Rolling the language

To see how it fits.

Words and tongues

Creating a voice.

Poetry.

So how would you go about creating found poetry with children?  One of the easiest ways to start is with a text that you are using  somewhere in the curriculum.  Allow the children to collect, on post-its or whiteboards, words and phrases that they like or think have an impact.  Pool these so that there is a large bank which could be displayed on the working wall.  Model  selecting some of the post-its and trying them out in different combinations seeing which work and which don’t.  Read them aloud.  Take some out and add more in until you have something to share.  Other ideas are to:-

• photocopy part of a text and allow children to highlight text that they want on it.  Cut this out and rearrange.
• give children different texts based on a theme to collect words and phrases from and then pool them to create with.
• set up a display of words and phrases that children can create poems with.  Record each of the poems created and explore the similarities and differences.
• the recording of the poems could be by photograph.  Take a look at the Flickr Found Poetry group.
• How about Haiku from error messages?
• And why not have a blog of found poetry?  Find the poems by clicking on the categories.

I worked with a school last week on talk for writing and we looked briefly at inventing texts.  I took the following characters along with me.

In order that children start to invent texts we need to hook them into what they know already so I drew the characters out of a bag one at a time and asked what stories do you know that have a character like this in it?

For the shark, people obviously suggested Jaws (there has to be a series of dance lessons in this soundtrack) and linked in to an overcoming the monster type story.  There was a lot of blood and lost limbs in these stories.  As we kept going we started to think about stories where the sharks had lost their teeth -  more traditional and in the style of The Leopard who Lost his Spots.

Once Barbie came out we couldn’t think of any stories with her as a character but if we took her as a symbol of a young female character we thought of the girl who lost her leg, a mermaid who swam to the depths of the ocean to recover the shark’s lost teeth or Pamela Anderson!

Groups then set off to devise their own story, acting like magpies and borrowing some of the good ideas from the shared section.

Although we didn’t have time, the next activity would have been to map the story that had been generated and then to start the retelling.  Here the teacher’s role is to encourage the use of appropriate story language.

We did however, try the same activity as a non-fiction text and guess what?  It works.  We mapped what we know about sharks onto a non-chronological skeleton and then orally retold one of the paragraphs.

How have you approached inventing sessions?

Linked posts: Talk for Writing – Inventing Texts

One of the mantra’s that schools are using nowadays is Pie Corbett’s imitate, innovate and invent.  As a literacy team we have spent a long time sharing with others what imitate and innovate mean in terms of writing but have not focused on the invention aspect in any detail.  However, without frequent inventing sessions we are in danger of missing out on a key aspect of talk for writing.

Inventing is where children start to make up stories for themselves, drawing on their bank of told stories as well as their lives and needs to start as soon as children enter school.  These inventing sessions should be oral, guided by the teacher, recycling story language and an opportunity to draw on a range of stories and life.  Pie talks about this is terms of story but in fact children can undertake exactly the same type of acitivity with non-fiction.  Many children will need some props to support their oral retelling and there are a vast range of ideas available.  Here are some of our favourites:

• mind-mapping what children know about stories in terms of characters, settings, problem, resolution, ending, story language or language features and themes.  Children then use the mind-map as a bank and draw out something from each section and then put them together as a story.  This could also be done for the content for any type of non-fiction writing.
• If you want to invent a myth or legend then the storycards in the Further Literacy Support (FLS) box are particularly good for this.  If you have lost yours get an A4 colour or black and white set here
• Interesting props that you have collected which could be anything from a magic key to a unicorn to a special pot.
• Flickr have a great group called Tell a Story in Five Frames for Kids which is sets of 5 pictures telling a story.  Some of these could be a really useful prop to story telling.  Some could even be used for non-fiction texts such as a newspaper report or a recount.  In fact why not take your own 5 frames to tell a story.
• Start with one of the seven basic plots for storytelling.
• For yrs 5 and 6 try one of these statements as a stimulus for storytelling from Adam Maxwell.  I also like the idea of this site.  Hover over a number and see if you can orally tell what it says.
• tell the story of the graph.  This is a familiar science activity but can also be used for story.  There are several graph drawing programmes but a piece of paper is probably the best technology for this activity. 

As children become more familiar with the idea of inventing sessions they will start to draw more and more on what they already know and have experienced.  Our role as teachers is to support children to tell in detail using the language that is appropriate to that type of text.

I am constantly amazed at the tools that are on the web and the fact that there are so many people out there willing to share them.  I found Thriller Whizz on Mark Warner’s wonderful site that includes Ideas to Inspire.  This one was on  Inspire Writing.

Thriller Whizz is designed to generate titles for thriller novels.  However, there are other uses that it can be put to.  To work the generator drag the words that you want onto the lines and press whizz.   A discussion about word classes would be interesting.  Are they all nouns?  What about when used individually and in combination?

If you are familiar with the Talk for Writing activity usual words in unusual combinations (watch the video) then you will find that this little programme can be used in the same way.  For instance I used just word A and word B and generated some great phrases: thunderbolt shuffle, humbug detector, stolen epidemic, chocolate dimension (I live in that one!).  Press the reset button and choose a different order.  Word B followed by word A gave duplicity charabanc and constellation spider.  So much to discuss in terms of meaning for these words individually and when combined.

Click reset again and this time try 3 words.  AAB gave me midnight American forbidding and quiet gorgon phenomonen.  With 3 words you sometimes have to make changes to  make sense but that is OK.  If you want to keep some of the words click on them and then press whizz again.

There are so many combinations to try.  This is a fantastic tool to support children in identifying unusual combinations of words that have a sense.  What’s the best combination that you come up with?

If only I knew how to use Flash, I would make one of these that allowed teachers and children to put in their own words and whizz them.  Maybe a little summer holiday task?

As part of our talk for writing initiative, we have been thinking about writer talk recently.  This is where we consider the emotion or response that the writer triggers in us and then how they did it.

One of the things that we all know is that writers read.  Stephen King in On Writing, a memoir of the craft says

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. p142

I have been enjoying Waterstone’s Writer’s choice over the last few months.  This is a display of 40 books that authors have found to be important to them for a variety of reasons.  I particularly like the little cover which they write for each book.

What a great idea this would be for children to do.  They could compile a list of 5 or 10 books that are really important to them and their writing and pen a little cover explaining why.  This would make a great display in a classroom or library.

Kate mosse is the current author and I have selected several of her choices for holiday reading.

We have now finished our talk for writing conferences.  We had some fantastic comments and people have been emailing us having gone back into the classroom to try things out.

I am amazed at the way the children in my class have taken to the ‘talk the text’ part of the sequence for non-fiction (recount). They really seem to enjoy it and as you said they had the whole text down pat in just 3 days. We have begun to create their own texts using HMSS and it is amazing how great their ideas sound based loosely on the structure of the original text. I stood back today and listened to them in pairs as the whole class worked on the first bit of their own recount, talking it to their partners. It was such a buzz to see them doing the learning and being so creative without me having to jaw jaw from the front all the time. It was great.  We still need to get to grips with the finer details of a sequence like this but I am completely sold on it (which I didn’t really expect to be). I think they are making such fast progress, but lots of it comes from them with me facilitating, rather than being the fount of all wisdom. It is good to see very average children really discussing in a quality way to improve each others ideas and to come up with quality

What is talk for writing? from joy simpson on Vimeo.

We have posted all of our talk for writing resources on our website.  Beware the retelling of Mr Gumpy!  We also have talk for writing resources here.  What have you tried?

We quite often play a game on training days suggested by Pie Corbett in his book JumpStart! StoryMaking called Disasters.  Pie gives an example of 5 disasters for Superman such as his Dad tells him not to start fights or  his Gran gives him kryptonite pants for christmas.

In order to be able to play this game children have to have a good understanding of the story/character that they are devising the disasters for and have to be able to identify events that would cause a problem.

These posters must be the visual equivalent of the disasters game.  They were designed for a Star Wars Convention.

Thanks to @lindseyb16 and @dannynic for sharing.  MyModernMet has all thirteen posters.

Visual literacy is a vital part of life nowadays. It exists as an area in its own right but it can also be used to support the teaching and learning of  writing. This post is an attempt to describe how we do that. We:-

• use images to support understanding of literary techniques, e.g. putting title slides in a film that has been run through Moviemaker to show where there would be paragraph changes if it was a written text
• use images to demonstrate understanding, e.g. collecting a group of images that reflect the meaning of a poem or the theme of a story (focus on images that show not tell)
• use images to support memory and create a shared understanding, e.g this is most frequently used after a trip or a visitor to the classroom
• use images to suppport vocabulary development, watch the film for an example of this

Generating description from joy simpson on Vimeo.

• use images to support understanding of text structure, e.g. through sequencing activities which can develop to show flash backs and other time management techniques
• use images to help create the message for the reader, e.g. choice of image in a persuasive text or an explanatory text
• create film