In our final Talk4Writing video, we wanted to share our wonderful Year 1 storytellers! Last term, as part of their topic on Growing and Changes, the class learned a talking text for The Enormous Turnip. As you will see from the video, the children’s actions and words brought this complicated story to life!

By learning to read a pictorial story map, children developed the confidence to retell this extended story – complete with the finer details of characters, speech and, of course, an exciting ending!

Each talking text provides a wealth of opportunities for the teacher to model techniques for writing. This traditional tale has huge potential for teaching characters and story sequences. On a grammatical level, the story clearly demonstrates how to make lists and use punctuation such as commas and full stops. As they have the story memorised, children typically become more confident in their writing and are more able to make adaptations of their own.

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The history and heritage of Native American storytelling is famous across the world. It’s no wonder, then, that one of these stories inspired our Year 3 class to share their learning by performing their Talking Text.

As part of their Talk4Writing literacy project on Myths, Legends and Adventure Stories, students explored the shared text through a range of drama and performance techniques. Characters and settings were explored in collaboration with peers to encourage discussion and develop the understanding of all students.

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Take a look at this fantastic Talk4Writing text from the Flamingo Class! As part of their World Exploration topic, students studied stories that take place in other worlds. They set about learning Where the Wild Things Are as a talking text. They were given simple visual prompts in the form of a story map and were challenged to create all the actions for their story independently.

Read on to read some Year 4 imaginary world stories that were inspired through this work.

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Talk4Writing isn’t only about storytelling. As our Year 5 students can demonstrate, this literacy technique is applicable across the curriculum for teaching language techniques in any written genre.

Year 5 students studied the “I have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. as part of their “Space and Segregation” topic. They were exploring persuasive writing in their literacy lessons and wanted to understand how this famous speech used powerful language and persuasive techniques to emphasize the aims of the Civil Rights protest of 1963. These techniques were then be adapted and re-invented by students in their own powerful, ‘I have a dream’ persuasive writing texts – read on to see some examples.

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Do you know how to read instructions? Well, Osprey class do!  We have been learning, not only how to read instructions but to write them too.

Using Talk for Writing Yr 2 learnt the type of language, the layout and the features of an instructional text all through pictures and actions.  Ospreys practised these and can now use them to write their own instructions.

Did you know that you need to use bossy verbs like decorate, stick, mix, slice and put?  Also you need to use sentence openers like first, next, after that, then and finally.

Next week, we will be writing instructions for making a fruit salad as part of our All About Me topic and food for a tea party with The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Keep checking our blog for pictures of our instructions and the things we make.

This term, in the Flamingo Class, we have been thinking about how we can explain our ideas to someone else. Writing an explanation, it appears, is harder than you’d think!

To help us remember the structure of an explanation text, we have been learning a Talking Text! At first, we thought Mr Toby had gone mad! The talking text didn’t look anything like a book we’d seen before.

This means we all learned to speak our text aloud, before writing anything down! This helped us a lot, as we were able to make sure we included titles, subheadings, full stops, commas and subordinating clauses. All of that without even writing a single word!

This week we have been busy using our talking text to help us write our own explanations, based on our science learning. It was amazing how we were all able to remember our full stops better!

Feel free to drop by Flamingo Class to check out our fantastic writing!