'Pie Corbett' approach to writing ..

[bluegiraffe]

Could parents/ teachers give me any info, positive or negative about this please. Never heard of it and a school we looked round today uses it so interested to know the lowdown on it from anyone who knows of it
/ uses it?
Thanks!

[puppy08]

We use many of his materials and strategies to plan our writing themes. We recently followed his ideas for building up to writing non chronological reports with great success.

I'm not sure how revolutionary the ideas are, but for a new teacher or a teacher who is switching phase or year group his materials are useful for breaking down different steps in the writing process. I also use his little books alot for snappy grammar, punctuation and spelling games, the kids love them. HTH

[XBenedict]

Our school has used this method this year and it's been very successful. I am not a teacher but I understand it's about story telling and retelling. First the children imitate the story, then they explore changing something like the location, or an character and seeing the effect leading to them being able to invent their own stories.

[mrz]

It works!

[mrz]

www.talk4writing.com/id9.html

[Littlefish]

He was one of my lecturers at college..... Doesn't help you at all, but he was lovely, and fantastically inspiring!

[Galena]

Littlefish - he was one of my lecturers too... (C&GCHE/UoG?) Lovely, lovely man and incredible to listen to!

[Littlefish]

C&G! How long ago? Mine was about 17 years ago....

[Galena]

Erm... Sept '97- Jul '98 I think... (I then got a teaching job in G, taught for 11.5 years, had DD at 27 weeks and haven't taught since!)

[Littlefish]

Ah, you were PGCE - I was B-ed. Unless you spent every weekend at either the Prom Club, or Enigma, our paths may not have crossed.

I worked in C for 5 years, but did one of my placements in G.

[MrsBazinga]

I've used Pie Corbett's methods and think it works brilliantly. The premise is that "if they can't say it, don't expect them to write it".

You start off with the text genre you're learning about (story types, instructions, explanations, reports etc) and teach the children to 'tell' a basic text. You all learn to say it aloud by heart, adding actions to aid memory. You 'immerse' yourself in the text, and imitate it in different ways - draw maps to retell, role-play parts, do creative activities investigating settings, words and phrases, tell it in groups and pairs, 'box-it up', analysing the structure, sentences , grammar etc. This usually takes a few days, with not much writing, but loads and loads of talking.

Once the children are confident, you start 'innovating' - use the learnt text as a starting point, and start writing, but innovate and change the text. You might add more information, or adjectives, or more complex sentence structures, or rewrite changing the setting or main character, whatever your particular writing focus is. You then 'polish' your writing - editing, correcting, improving.

Last of all is 'independent invention' - you take what you've learned about a text genre and apply it in a different context to produce a piece of original writing. The whole process usually lasts 3 weeks.

Different schools will approach it in different ways, with different time scales, but essentially you 'talk' through everything and immerse, imitate, innovate and then invent.

[Horopu]

I've got a couple of his books. Can anyone recommend one that really covers the method?

[mrz]

pinterest.com/maz21/talk4writing/ free videos of Pie teaching using his method

www.school-portal.co.uk/GroupDownloadFile.asp?GroupId=712152&ResourceId=2204564

[Galena]

Yes, I was PGCE the year all the 4 year BEd and 3 year BEd students finished thanks to the course length changing. Made jobhunting interesting!

[Littlefish]

I think you must have been the same year as me then.... I was a 2 year B-ed person finishing at the same time as the 3 year people!

[Horopu]

Thanks for the links mrz .

[bluegiraffe]

Thanks everyone for all info and links - very helpful, and reassuring. :-)

PS: also happy to have brought Littlefish and Galena together ;-))

[Littlefish]

[Galena]

indeed.