Writing Together at Christmas 2025

At St George's we love to have a collaborative writing experience at Christmas time. This year,  we came together in our mixed age colour groups to have a fun writing for pleasure day. We came dressed in pyjamas for the Polar Express. The day began with the book in the hall then we travelled throughout the school writing for different purposes. We wrote instructions for hot chocolate, applied to be a new elf for Santa, wrote letters to Santa to share the kindness of a friend and wrote acrostic poems. Everyone had a fabulous day and achieved alot of writing! 

TALK FOR WRITING AT ST GEORGE'S

St. George’s C of E Primary School is a Talk for Writing school. This means we follow the Talk for Writing programme created by Pie Corbett to teach Literacy throughout the school.

The inspiration for this choice of Literacy scheme came from a desire to develop engagement and achievement in writing throughout the school to help our pupils make the best start to their future lives. As the introduction to the national curriculum says: ‘Fluency in the English language is an essential foundation for success in all subjects.’ We love Talk For Writing's  clear, creative and active approach to inspire our students. The Talk for Writing framework suits our needs perfectly as it creates a collaborative and consistent delivery of Literacy lessons throughout school. This shared method is rich in vocabulary and stories which has enabled our students to flourish.

Following in-depth training we have embedded the Talk for Writing method into our daily teaching. We have found the teaching style is perfect for our students as they benefit from the strong principles of the scheme.

Talk for Writing lessons feature talk and discussion at their heart. This boosts the self-esteem of our students who all benefit from their personal ideas and opinions being shared each day. They are encouraged to express themselves through vocabulary study, grammar games and collaborative writing activities. Informal talk gives our students the chance to experiment and build their vocabularies and grammar knowledge in an informal and active way.

Please see the following Power Point Presentation for an overview of the teaching process. Please contact the Literacy coordinator, Fiona Hall, for any further information. 

Phonics and Early Reading

For all our information on Phonics and Early reading, please see our ‘Phonics and Early Reading’ page. 

Poetry 

We really enjoyed celebrating National Poetry Day on Thursday 2nd October 2025. The theme this year was 'Play'. We wrote poems together, and shared poetry at story time. There were some fun 5 minute poetry writing games, such as the one below that got us thinking creatively. Have a go yourself! At St George's we love to read and write poetry together. 

Each DDAT school submitted two winning entries for each Key Stage. The overall winners from the academy will be included in a DDAT book for which there will be a celebratory launch! Entries were in on 14th February and we are very proud to announce that one of our Year 6 writers is through to the grand final! Congratulations!

WRITING TOGETHER AT CHRISTMAS 2024

This Christmas time we came together as a school to share inspiration for writing. This year we  focused on 'Coming Home' by Michael Morpurgo. It is an exciting tale about a  plucky little robin who set out on an epic journey. Each class created a different genre of writing based on this tale and had a fun time writing. 

You could use the Book Trust 100 books to read before you’re 14.

How many of these books have you read?