Writing at Booker Hill
At Booker Hill Primary and Nursery School, we believe that it is vital that children are equipped with the skills to communicate confidently and eloquently. In accordance with the National Curriculum, we want pupils to develop a strong command of the written and spoken word, as well as a love of language and reading.
Children from Early Years to Year 6, receive English teaching every morning, covering a range of writing styles and skills. For our Nursery children this could begin by learning a Nursery Rhyme or song.
Writing genres are mapped across the school to enable children to develop the ability to write for a range of purposes and audiences.
We use Pie Corbet’s Talk for Writing approach to teach writing. Talk for Writing is powerful because it enables children to orally imitate the language they need for a particular topic before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version.
At Booker Hill, we carefully select the texts we use with the children so that they are age appropriate and engaging. Within the lessons and the model texts, we provide opportunities to teach end of year expectations for grammar, spelling, punctuation and vocabulary (appropriate for the writing genre) within all children's writing.
The Talk for Writing learning concept reflects the following pattern within a sequence of lessons:
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Cold Writing task—children have a go at the genre (assessment to inform planning)
- Hook – a drama or other enrichment activity to engage the children in the context and genre of the unit ahead
- Imitate – children explore a high quality model text as a reader and a writer. Short burst writing activities, including poetry and sentence level work, enable the children to become fluent with using the language of the genre. Story map images of the text help the children to actively learn the model off by heart along with actions for the images.
- Innovate – Children make changes to the text by sharing ideas, generating words and phrases.
- Invent – Children write their own version allowing them to use their own ideas within the genre of writing for their intended audience. Hot Writing task: Children create their own inventions
In addition to this, the following teaching sequence is used in all writing lessons to help the children to maximize their learning success throughout the Talk for Writing approach:
Learning Without Limits - There Is No 'Ceiling' On Learning
Scaffolding: story maps and actions enable all children to access high quality writing. The use of story maps in books offers less 
confident learners a guide to help them to innovate and invent. Less confident learners are encouraged to use the model text and to make changes based on this until they are ready to reach the invention stage.
Challenge: model texts embed sufficient challenge and opportunities for most pupils and are easily extended for more confident learners to venture further from the model text.
Learning Environment: flip chart paper is used and learning is presented on the learning walls for children to easily refer to. Their final written pieces of work are shared amongst the class and across the school.
In addition to our writing lessons, we develop pupils’ reading skills through reading sessions, where pupils may work in small groups to develop their word knowledge, comprehension and analytical skills. We want to encourage your child to not only be able to decode words and understand the meaning of a text, but to also ask questions of the text and to be able to infer meanings (“read between the lines”) - vital skills in the modern world! Studies show that reading, above all else, is the key to academic progress, we believe that by encouraging a love of reading, the more we open up the world of learning to our children.