Many teachers in Highland are planning, teaching and assessing writing using the Talk for Writing framework. This is not a one size fits all approach and needs to be adapted to suit your class.

We thought we’d share this example of good practice from Tore Primary School. Sally Thorne, class teacher, shares how she teaches writing while linking with other curricular areas and contexts.

Sally used ‘The Abominables’, a class reader from Pie Corbett’s reading spine as the stimulus for this unit of work. The unit was introduced with free writing on ‘If I met a yeti he….’ along with accompanying art work. This was successful in hooking the pupils, generating interest and excitement.

Sally shared the next steps…

“After group planning sessions, which includes building up word banks, I took one of the more successful plans, with tweaks and phrases from all groups and we created a class text that we could use for reading as a class. We pulled this apart for literacy techniques which could be used in the pupil’s writing.  

This was then the basis for the pupils to plan and create their own story, a section at a time.  As it’s a multi-stage writing process, some pupils are able to run with the idea, some need more support.  I try to create texts that contain as many of the T4W techniques as possible: repetition, power of 3, starting with adverbs etc.”

Click here for the Class Yeti Story