Here Christine and Lindsay share a planning process for story writing which they’ve used successfully with a number of the primary schools, producing great results. Its based around the Y-shaped diagram that brings together formative assessment with the process of immersing children in a quality model text, understanding its structure, and working on a new version collaboratively before the children work independently on a new piece based on all they’ve learnt.
Putting this into context we look at how a school in Kingston explored the process with Cinderella, developing this into a new tale about a football tryout. This involves looking at the story structure, immersion through drama and capturing ideas through short bursts of incidental writing. The importance of shared planning is discussed and we look at how this can be carried out effectively in the classroom - planning out the story together so that children can focus on their writing an applying new vocabulary, grammar and punctuation skills. We then see how this develops into independent writing, though still with some guidance on planning, based on the previous sessions, and how the structure of the overall process in fact leads to greater creativity from the children in the final results. We finish with a collection of story types that Christine and Lindsay have successfully taught in schools, and which you may want to try.
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Christine Chen and Lindsay Pickton
Christine and Lindsay are experienced English specialists based in Kingston upon Thames. They support numerous primary schools, alliances and federations. Both have worked in schools as senior literacy teachers and helped to launch and run school improvement programmes across their borough, and written for publishers including OUP, Pearson and Collins.