Writing

Our Writing Subject Leader is Miss Sanderson

Our Approach to Writing: Talk for Writing

At Grange Primary School, we want every child to become a confident and creative writer. To achieve this, we use 'Talk for Writing' by Pie Corbett, an exciting and highly effective approach used across the school to promote oracy and support children in developing the language required to write to a high standard.

We have successfully embedded and refined this approach for over a decade, adapting it to be effective for the children in our school community. The key feature is that children internalise the language structures they need by "talking the text" before they begin to write. This powerful step builds their confidence with vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns, helping them write independently for a wide variety of audiences and purposes—not just in English lessons but across all subjects.

Our Commitment to Excellence

To inspire our children, our English curriculum is built on a "core reading spine." This is a carefully chosen collection of excellent fiction, poetry, and non-fiction books that all children will experience during their time with us. These texts provide a rich source of inspiration and a model for high-quality writing. You can see our Reading Spine in the link at the side of this page and also across our class pages.

Our whole-school plan ensures our lessons are consistent and well-resourced. We invest heavily in our staff so they are all skilled practitioners of this approach. This commitment to maintaining the very highest standards in writing is further evidenced by our ongoing work with an expert English consultant from the official Talk for Writing team.

Key Components of Our Writing Lessons

To build on the Talk for Writing framework, our lessons incorporate a range of proven strategies:

Modelled Writing: Used regularly to demonstrate sentence structure and parts of a text. It is also used to model the ‘thinking process’ that a writer goes through in producing a piece of writing.
Shared Writing: Used in whole-class teaching, where children contribute their own thoughts and ideas to a piece of writing.
Guided Writing: Used to develop specific skills with small groups of children and takes place during the writing phase of an English unit.
Independent Writing: Planned opportunities (including 'extended writing' and incidental writing) in English and across the curriculum enable children to apply and consolidate their skills.

Building Foundational Skills

We place a high value on the technical aspects of writing to ensure every child can write with accuracy and confidence: