Literacy Resources

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.