Talk for Writing has been at the heart of our Key Stage 1 teaching for a number of years. It’s a powerful approach that encourages children to internalise language structures through talk, imitation, and innovation before moving on to independent application in their own writing. One of the key strengths of Talk for Writing is how it builds engagement from the very start, often using a hook to pull children into the unit and make them curious, excited, and motivated to explore the text type we’re working with.
This term, our Year 2 team is about to begin a new poetry unit focusing on onomatopoeia. Naturally, we wanted a strong hook; something fun, memorable, and rooted in sound and language. At the same time, I wanted to see how we could use Gemini, Google’s AI tool, to support the process.
What is Talk for Writing?
Let’s first look at Talk for Writing and make sure we understand the way it is used. Talk for Writing was first developed by Pie Corbett, and as mentioned above is a teaching approach that helps children develop as confident, creative writers by first internalising language patterns through talk. Rather than jumping straight into writing tasks, children are immersed in a text, learn to retell it orally, and gradually move towards innovating and creating their own versions. It’s built on the idea that if you can say it, you can write it.
The approach typically runs through three key phases:
1. Imitation Phase
In this first stage, children are introduced to a model text. They get to know it inside-out through oral retelling, actions, story maps, and lots of talk. The teacher also models key reading and writing skills, breaking down the structure and language features so children start to understand how it works. The aim here is familiarity and confidence.
2. Innovation Phase
Once children are confident with the model text, they move into innovating upon it. This might mean changing characters, settings, or key events in a story or adapting vocabulary and ideas in a poem. They are supported with shared writing, sentence-level work, and scaffolded opportunities to make the text their own while still leaning on the secure structure of the original.
3. Independent Application (or Invention) Phase
Finally, children apply what they’ve learned to an entirely new piece of writing. This is their chance to write independently, drawing on the structures, vocabulary, and skills they’ve internalised through the previous phases. Teachers assess this writing to see progress and plan next steps.
Throughout all three phases, talk is central; children learn to say, rehearse, and experiment with language before they write it. This makes writing less daunting, especially for younger learners or those with less confidence in literacy.
What is Gemini and Why Use It Here?
For those unfamiliar, Gemini is Google’s AI platform designed to help with everything from generating text to writing code. It’s not just a chatbot, it has a Canvas function where you can work on projects and refine them step by step presenting them visually(That’s key! It creates infographics website and visual interactive experiences). For teachers, this opens up huge potential. Many of us don’t have coding backgrounds, and yet so much of what we want to do with technology in the classroom involves small, bespoke tools. Gemini can act as a partner in building those tools, doing the “heavy lifting” of coding, while we bring the teaching context and creativity.
For our onomatopoeia unit, I wanted two very specific things:
- A Bingo game to act as the fun, engaging hook at the start of the unit.
- A Soundboard to support the cold writing task, where children respond to sounds before they’ve been explicitly introduced to the concept of onomatopoeia an started learning our example text.
The Hook: Bingo with Animal Sound
The idea was simple: the children would work in pairs with bingo cards. As sounds play, they listen carefully, identify the animal, and tick it off on their card. The first to complete a line shouts “Bingo!”
But to make this work in practice, I needed:
- A way to generate unique bingo cards for each pair.
- A sound generator that would play random animal noises during the game.
I knew what I wanted but didn’t want to spend hours coding it all from scratch. This is where Gemini came in.
I asked Gemini to create a website that could do two things:
- On the left side, generate printable bingo mats.
- On the right side, run the bingo game with randomly selected animal sounds.
Gemini didn’t disappoint. It generated the full HTML and JavaScript code for a basic working website. The structure was there I just had to supply my own sound files and images.
Making it Work in Practice
This is the part I think is most important for teachers: you don’t need to be an expert in coding to make this work. Here’s what I did step by step:
- Find sound files and images. I sourced free-to-use animal sounds and open freely animal photos.
- Upload files to a host. I put these on my own hosting space, but for most teachers, Google Drive or Google Sites would work just as well. (I have also created a tool to tun photos on your Drive into Hosted images you can link to: Drive Image Host)
- Share with Gemini. I took a screenshot of my file directory and gave this to Gemini. It correctly adjusted the filenames and paths in the code so everything linked up.
- Upload the code. I manually uploaded the HTML file to my hosting space. But if you’ve never touched HTML before, don’t worry! Just go to Google Sites, create a new page, and use the “Full page embed” option to paste the code in. That’s it.
Within minutes, I had a fully working site. I could generate bingo cards, download them, and run the game. After this I exported 20 unique bingo cards, laminated them, and had everything ready for next week.
Yes, I did go back later and add some extra touches, an information screen, a few stylistic tweaks, but the point is that the basic working tool was all Gemini’s doing.
You can check it out by yourselves here: Animal Sound Bingo
Cold Task: Writing Sentences from Sounds
In Talk for Writing, we always begin with a cold task: a piece of writing that captures what the children can do before they’ve been taught the new skills. For this unit, I wanted children to hear an animal, see its image, and write a sentence. Importantly, I didn’t want to give away the fact that we were focusing on onomatopoeia just yet, it needed to feel simple and open-ended.
The solution was a Soundboard.
I asked Gemini again, this time for a soundboard with six animal cards on the screen at once. Each card would show the image of an animal, and when tapped, it would play the sound. At the top of the page, I wanted a button to refresh the board and get six new animals.
Once again, Gemini delivered. The site was fully mobile-optimised, worked smoothly, and matched the style of the Bingo game. Children could tap, listen, and write a sentence about what they heard without distractions.
Have a play with the Animal Soundboard here: Link
Why This Matters
Now, I had three functioning websites:
- The Bingo game for our hook. (link)
- The Soundboard for our cold writing task. (link)
- A website to turn public Drive links into Hosted image links! (link)
Together, these gave me the structure I needed: engagement from the very start, and a clear cold task that sets a baseline before teaching begins.
The real power, though, lies in time saved for the team. I was able to share both tools with my Year 2 colleagues. They didn’t need to spend hours designing bingo cards or hunting for sounds. They could simply generate, print, and go. It’s a great example of how AI can support teachers, not by replacing the creativity or the pedagogy, but by doing the technical heavy lifting so we can focus on teaching.
Final Thoughts
Talk for Writing is about giving children ownership of language, helping them hear it, speak it, and play with it before writing it themselves. With Gemini, I was able to create tools that supported exactly that, without having to become a web developer overnight.
For teachers who might feel nervous about using code or building websites, the takeaway is this: you don’t have to know how to code. With a bit of curiosity and a willingness to ask the AI for what you want, you can create bespoke tools that make your lessons richer, more engaging, and more efficient to prepare.
As we head into our Year 2 poetry unit, I feel confident that our students will not only enjoy the hook but also feel supported through the writing journey. And for us as teachers, it’s reassuring to know that AI can help us bring our ideas to life in practical, classroom-ready ways.