Developing Creative Writing in the Foundation Phase

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Developing Creative Writing in the Foundation
Phase

• Understand the different purposes and function of
  written language as a means of
• -remembering
• -organising
• -developing ideas and information and as a source
  of enjoyment

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Communicate by

• experimenting with mark-making
• producing pieces of emergent writing
• beginning to write in a conventional way
• writing with increasing confidence, fluency and
  accuracy, making choices about vocabulary

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• Childrens writing should be encouraged and
  enriched by opportunities throughout the learning
  environment both indoors and outdoors, supported
  by props and dressing up clothes.
• This allows children, through their
  child-initiated play, to recreate or extemporise
  around the stories they have experienced.
• This in turn, provides an opportunity to
  cultivate confident storytellers and early story
  writers (Talk for Writing)

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Range

• stories
• poems
• diaries
• notes
• lists
• captions
• records
• messages, notices, invitations, instructions

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Why Stories?Narrative is a primary act of mind

• we dream in narrative, remember, anticipate,
  hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise,
  criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and
  love by narrative (Hardy)

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Storytelling into Writing

• Storytelling is a natural human activity
• Story writing is a complex activity requiring
  children to internalise language patterns
• The storymaking process begins with loitering
  with the text
• talking the text type

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Imagination

• the issue is not so much a lack of the ability
  to imagine- but rather a lack of the building
  blocks with which to imagine ( Pie Corbett)
• building a storehouse of stories inside the mind
  lies at the heart of storymaking
• hearing and telling stories is the most powerful
  way of acquiring language

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• Reading and writing float on a sea of talk.
• (Britton, 1993)
• Language is the dress of thought.
• (Samuel Johnson
• 1709-1784)

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3 Key skills to Story making

• Imitation
• Innovation
• Invention

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7 steps to teaching a new form

• Familiarisation
• Discovery/ problem solve
• Model
• Share
• Guided
• Independent construction
• Present to audience

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• What warmth! What heat! It made Gatty stretch
  each limb, like a cat. Before long it made her
  yawn and yawn again. It seemed to make her
  stronger and weaker, both at the same time.

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• Im as clean as a cats tongue, she carolled.
  
• No, as clean as a conker. You know, when its
  just split out of its mucky old shell.

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Feed Me!

• Feeding the imagination- how?
• Words, words and more words, the role of poetry
  and the storyteller

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Read to me!

• weaving the magic
• learning the craft of writing
• a rich vein of reading, poetry and rhyme, drama
  and play plus interactive talk are all essential

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Linking Sounds and Letters

• Systematic phonics provide children with the
  skills and knowledge that enable them to write
  phonemically plausible attempts at anything they
  can verbalise.
• This gives the children confidence to apply talk
  for writing in the creation of simple captions
  and sentences, either by writing or manipulating
  plastic/ magnetic letters

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Schools which have stories at their heart

• At the heart of every culture lies song, dance,
  art religionand stories
• Without the arts, we have no heart, no culture
  and our schooling becomes dry dust upon the wind
  (Pie Corbett)

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