Into the Classroom | Story Retelling and Writing

Talk for Writing is a unique process that uses spoken activities to develop writing skills. Children use simple gestures to represent some words or phrases from the stories that not only act as fantastic mnemonic devices but also help tremendously in acquiring the key skill of storytelling. It is important for reception children to be able to retell a simple story that they construct in their minds. Story retelling is a stepping stone for success in writing. As children read and are read to, they store patterns that form the building blocks of written expression. In order to write sentence patterns, appropriate to a given text (e.g. a recount starts with 'when, who, what and where' elements) children need to have these patterns modelled with multiple opportunities to say them before being expected to write them.

Pupils learn to orally recite and act out popular stories through listening and reading. The teacher maps out the story using pictures to aid pupils’ memory. The repetition allows the pupils to interact with the text and helps them to internalize the language patterns and text features. Pupils are then taught to use the underlying structure of the original text to create their own version on a different topic. Over time, they move towards independent writing as they create texts about their own topics.

Talk for Writing is used from reception and continues in Junior school. It forms part of the learning journey of a Wellingtonian across different parts of the school.

Reception children did a fabulous job showing their story retelling prowess in Mandarin on stage for their assembly performance when they performed Camarasaurus looking for Mum. They showed the Wellington value of Courage and Responsibility.