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Any primary literacy people, big writing/talk for writing experiences?

6 replies

josiecat · 01/02/2014 13:29

I've recently taken over as lit coordinator & writing is a big focus for improvement. I need to develop a whole school approach & am looking at both approaches, but leaning more to talk for writing. Our children come into school with very low levels, particularly in speaking & listening. I'm unlikely to get any more training myself so I need to get up to speed on the approach I want the school to use & teach everyone else to do it. Does anyone have any wisdom, experiences of either they'd like to share? I'm reading a lot but trying to get a balanced view. Thanks.

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partystress · 01/02/2014 15:15

I think those terms now mean so many different things in different schools that asking for others experiences might not be all that helpful.

But, FWIW, In our school, Big Write used to mean a task unconnected to the genre we were looking at in our usual lessons, given to the children a couple of days before BW day so they could talk about it at home. Then on BW day, we would do 45 mins of VCOP warm up activities, then children would sit and write for 45 mins. We would then mark and level using the Ros Wilson criteria.

To my mind, it was a writing test every week and a chunk of time when the children weren't being taught or learning. Not all teachers gave thorough enough feedback for children to get anything out of it. The children who enjoyed writing loved it, the rest hated it. Done this way, I wouldn't see it as having any benefit if speaking and listening is your top priority - but I think you could wrap talk for writing around any approach you follow, as long as you don't get too hooked up in the 'rules' of whatever route you go down.

Now we mostly do independent writing through our topic work. We work on writing skills connected to the genre we are working towards (eg direct and reported speech, summarising, past tense and paragraphs if we will be producing a newspaper report for our topic). Long independent writing is still done in a separate BW book, but the children feel they are building up towards it and more of them look foward to haveing chance to show what they have learned. We mark it and use APP style sheets to gauge levels, which we feedback to children every half term. In UKS2, we still spring a totally unprepped long write on them and we use this to moderate our levellling.

If writing is an issue, you might want to have a look at Alan Peat. It's not all brilliant, but his idea of teaching different sentence types is, in my view, a more effective and holistic way of teaching 'good' writing than VCOP which IMVHO leads to formulaic, robotic writing.

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josiecat · 01/02/2014 15:39

Thanks for that, it's very useful & given me more to consider. I know we have to make any approach work for us. I'm in a small school, so it's good to chat to others & hear about experiences in other schools.

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JonSnowKnowsNothing · 01/02/2014 15:46

I'm an English Coordinator too. One thing we've seen have a big effect in the upper KS2 is limiting writing to 30 minutes. As a PP said, many kids do not like 45 minute big write sessions and I found that to be honest I was wasting a huge amount of time marking drivel where the child had stopped doing their best.

Now, during the week's English lessons we teach the skills/features/grammar aspects of the text, each child chooses two or three personal targets and they write for 30 mins. It also helps them manage their time effectively as they have to conclude their work.

Marking-wise, the children often swap books and peer mark against the criteria. They use highlighters to show exactly where the writer has used a reporting clause, adverbial, etc. etc. then they write a couple of sentences about what they enjoyed and how they could improve it next time.

For us this has worked as it has made a peer assessment into a really valuable tool, instead of just "it was good," "I liked it" etc.

Please feel free to message if you'd like me to send any resources we use.

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JonSnowKnowsNothing · 01/02/2014 15:47

Ooh and we stress massively that writing in theme books, RE books, science books, etc is expected to be of the same high standard as in English books.
We're a small school too.

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josiecat · 01/02/2014 17:32

What do you find is most effective in ks1? We have a big problem with kids coming into FS at a very low level so we need to put lots of work in to get them close to expected levels by the end of ks1. We do lots of phonics obviously but find kids struggle to apply it in writing independently.

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JonSnowKnowsNothing · 01/02/2014 17:48

I'm afraid I have no experience in KS1, as I've only ever worked in Junior Schools. Hopefully someone else will have some ideas...

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