Telling into Writing

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Six quite varied primary schools in a northern English city joined together to form a Network Learning Community with a focus on improving literacy. This project formed one strand of several that were worked on over a 3 year period.

Although standards varied across the schools there was a shared perception that many of the children were reluctant to write fiction and when they did their work lacked structure. They seemed to find it hard to grasp the idea of plot and sometimes even sequencing. They were using very limited language and little or no character development. In some of the schools it was clear that children had little or no pre-school experience of traditional tales and nursery rhymes.

An effective strategy had been employed experimentally in Year 1 in one of the schools. The Year 1 children were orally taught a story with gestures and visual prompts.In conjunction with an LEA literacy advisor, a small group of low achieving Year 6 children worked with the younger group to support their learning. The children then followed a two week block of literacy work which eventually led to writing their own versions of the story. This approach was based on the work of Pye Corbett and became known as 'Telling into Writing'.

The Network Learning Community with the support of the LEA advisor extended the scheme and developed resource packs for each year group. The packs were linked to literacy targets from the Spring Term for each year group. The packs consisted of an oral version of the story or poem with gestures and visual prompts, a selection of photocopiable resources, suggestions for role-play materials, a list of web links and a two week block of preplanned literacy lessons. The class learned the story, then moved on to use it as a starting point for the block of work.

Stories or poems with a defined structure worked best.These lent themselves to an oral approach. The teacher or teaching assistant wrote a simplified version of the story and developed a set of gestures to be used with it. The story could be written to ensure the use of language structures, forms, words, needed for the term targets. For example a very simplified version of Treasure Island was re-written with short chapters, time connectives and interesting adjectives to meet the criteria for the Year 3 target "Write an adventure story in multiple chapters".

Although some classes were used to learning poems, speaking a story as a group was a new and intitially confusing experience. Some older classes were quite resistant and wanted to read from the text. The use of gestures to act as prompts was vital. Most classes did manage to learn the whole story and many practiced it until they felt happy to perform it in assemblies. The story was worked on for 15 minutes or so at the start of the day and usually took about ten days to learn.

This initial phase was followed by the two week block the final outcome of which was a piece of independently produced extended writing. During the two weeks several other pieces of writing were also produced. Children also had classroom access to a role-play area where props relating to the story could be used.

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