Students in Kindergarten to Year 4 learn the skills for writing through the multisensory Talk for Writing approach. It is based on the premise that you can’t write sentences unless you can say them, and you can’t say them unless you’ve heard them. Students build up a bank of knowledge about fiction and non-fiction texts and learn them orally to build up a bank of language that is used to create their own texts. Students start by drawing story maps, learning the story orally and putting actions to it. Students then participate in shared writing before moving to independent writing.
These three phases are known as:
Information about this approach and its three phases can be viewed at www.talk4writing.com/about/.
The developer of Talk for Writing, Pie Corbett also explains the approach in the following videos:
Writing in Years 5 and 6 is supported by the Writing Revolution which used the Hochman Method. Students receive sequenced explicit instruction that builds from sentences to compositions. It also teaches the skills of planning, note-taking, revising and summarizing. This approach works to reduce the cognitive load on students by providing guidelines to produce sentence stems, through repeated practice and supporting students to map their writing. By learning through the Hochman Method, upper primary students are further prepared for the writing demands in high school.
Information about this approach can be viewed at www.thewritingrevolution.org/method/
