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.

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?

For some time now as a team we have been thinking about the role of talk for writing in improving writing.  This has been aided by Pie Corbett through attending training and reading his books.  It has become clear to us that there are several key points when planning teaching sequences that need to have talk for writing built in and they are:

• book talk – talking as a reader
• writer’s talk – talking as a writer
• warming up the word
• learning and remembering texts
• playing with sentences, and
• rehearsing and refining your own texts

Over the next year we will be exploring all of these in much more detail, but first I want to focus on warming up the word, or as one teacher describes it – awakening dormant language.

When talking about himself as a writer, Pie describes the need to concentrate or focus on a particular image in his head or feeling and to be able to turn that into words.  Ted Hughes in Poetry in The Making describes this same things by saying

‘by looking at the place in my memory very hard and very carefully and by using words that grow naturally out of pictures and feelings, I capture it.’

So if we want children to develop as writers, it would seem that this is something that we could support them with starting off with external artefacts moving on to internal ones .  In fact we probably do this by using images and generating lists of words.  However, we need to take this further because sometimes the list of words is not very exciting.  Hughes states that you must

‘keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words.’

So how about generating words for one minute in a quickfire way and record them.  Then as a teacher scaffold the image involving the senses – how did it feel when the wings brushed past you, what could you smell, are there any particular noises that you can hear?  Now allow 2 mins for children to jot down (or the teacher record if writing will hinder the learning) their further ideas.  Share these ideas, celebrate the ones that stand out and allow children to borrow those that they like.  You never know when they may turn up in writing again.  Some thought will need to be given as to how ideas can be recorded for future use.  This whole activity should take no longer than 10 minutes because as Hughes says

‘it should be short and sharp and create a crisis which arouses the brain’s resources.  The compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions, flings everything into top gear and many things that are usually hidden find themselves rushed into the open.  Barriers break down, prisoners break out of their cells.’

In poetry and fiction we rely heavily on our own images and feelings as that is what we are trying to convey to the reader.  Non-fiction is slightly different.  Here we need to stick with the external image.  If I am writing a description of a blackbird so that others can identify one in their own garden, it is best if I don’t rely on my own image of that bird but use an image that is actually a blackbird.  The way of generating words and phrases however,  will be exactly the same.

Both writers ponder the same question.  What would happen to children’s writing if they had to write a quick-fire poetry idea every day for a year – ten minutes writing daily?  As Corbett points out, athletes train every day, pianists practice scales every day.  Shouldn’t children be involved in a daily tussle with words?

Ted Hughes learnt to focus through fishing.  He would spend many hours staring at the float pondering on the conditions, the liklihood of catching something and letting his mind wander.  If you would like suggestions for developing this type of quickfire activity then a copy of Pie Corbett’s Jumpstart! Poetry is a good starting place.

And if you enjoy reading blogs, then you might like Deb Renner Smith’s blog  Writing Every Day Works

How do you warm up the word in your classroom?  Please add an idea in the comments section.

Games and activities for ages 7 – 12

This is one of Pie’s latest books based on his recent work around talk for writing .  The book is packed full of ideas for developing children’s story telling and story making.  The sections based around creative warm-ups and strengthening the imagination are especially valuable for dev eloping a writer’s ethos in the classroom.

If you search for this book on Amazon, you can look inside the first few pages and see some of the activities.  I like the idea of Video Writing as a way of releasing words from children.

All KS2 teachers should have a copy of this book.