English
Luton Primary School has adopted the Talk for Writing approach for teaching English within EYFS, KS1 and lower KS2. Talk for Writing is a whole-school, cumulative approach to teaching writing that enables children to develop good speaking and listening skills and make rapid progress in writing whilst developing a love of literature and story-telling at the same time. The English curriculum at Luton Primary School is designed to engage even the most reluctant writer and to develop confident writers that are willing to take risks in order to produce engaging pieces of work.
Talk for Writing takes the children through a process that enables them to have access to high quality models for their writing in the form of stories, factual information and poetry, gives them the chance to develop their vocabulary bank over time, learn about grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPAS) and publish their own pieces of work for an agreed audience. Each unit of work is divided into three main parts:
Imitation: This is the chance to get to know a high quality text really well. The children learn the text and rehearse it using actions to aid memory, they discuss the text and answer comprehension questions about it, they discuss key words from the text and practise using them in different contexts (speed words), the engage in drama activities in order to gain a deeper understanding of situations and characters and they complete ‘short burst’ writing activities in response to the text.
Innovation: This part of the process uses shared writing to model the process of creating our own stories, information pieces or poems. The children are given scaffolds to aid them in creating their own piece of writing that is similar or based on the text explored during imitation. The writing process in segmented into small chunks throughout lessons to make the process well supported for even our youngest pupils and the children are encouraged to continually consider their choices around structure, word choice and GPAS in order to create texts that are engaging for the reader. Constant shared writing also develops writing habits within the class community of writers. Each year, new strategies and techniques are introduced, building on previous learning and giving children confidence as writers.
Independent Application: This is the opportunity for the children to engage in sustained writing tasks and allows them the independence to apply their new knowledge in a creative way. There is an emphasis during this part of the process on ‘having a go’ and then editing to improve. The children’s final pieces of work are then published in some way e.g. in a class book, displayed on the wall or published for display in the school library.
The English curriculum at Luton Primary School is founded on the principle that teachers should increase the amount children read/are read to and establishing a very strong ‘literature spine’ which identifies key stories, picture books, poems and non-fiction which will be read and drawn upon and referred to when teaching writing. Over time, children gradually build their bank of well-known texts, supplemented by picture books, novels, poems and non-fiction books. Gradually this living library of language begins to equip the children with the words they need to express themselves. In the same way, the ability to manipulate that bank of texts increasingly enables children to create new version and invent their own stories.