Writing
Mrs N Fitzpatrick - English Subject Leader
Intent
To develop a quality curriculum and nurture a culture where children take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style for a range of contexts.
Implementation
The School aims to:
- give Writing a purpose and make it an enjoyable experience by presenting a wide variety of writing opportunities;
- develop the children’s confidence as young writers;
- help children see writing as an important means of communication;
- develop Writing by positive teaching of skills and encouragement;
- give each child the opportunity to write in a variety of genres and for a variety of audiences.
Classroom writing situations should emphasise to the children the purpose of Writing and give the children the opportunity to write in a variety of genres and for different purposes and audiences.
Shared and modelled Writing, taking place within English lessons, allows the teacher to demonstrate good writing practice to the children while using their ideas. This is done using a variety of books and film stimulus, mostly adapting ‘The Write Stuff’. Teachers must ensure that the writing demonstrated shows high expectations and covers the success criteria they would expect to see in the children’s writing including across the ability groups.
Children are expected to write daily in a range of forms. Throughout a Write Stuff unit, Children will use experience days to immerse themselves in the text/film clip to gain an understanding of the purpose for their writing. Children then will follow highly structured and scaffolded writing lessons, gathering ideas and looking closely at the audience, content and sentence structures within their writing. This will involve lots of discussion around spelling, grammar and punctuation. Finally, children will have the opportunity to use what they have learnt to write independently using the skills they have learnt throughout the unit of work.
In our School we have high expectations of presentation. To support this handwriting, practice is undertaken regularly across School and children write in pencil until they obtain a pen licence. Teachers and Teaching Assistants are expected to demonstrate high quality presentation and handwriting when marking, working with children or scribing in a lesson.
In the new English curriculum grammar and spelling now plays a key role in the children’s writing. To support our children’s grammar and spelling progression and attainment the teachers integrate time to practising these skills within their English ‘Write Stuff’ lessons and through stand-alone lessons. Children will then use this in a follow up independent writing.
Spelling has been a big focus this year and we have implemented The Spelling Book by Jane Considine, linking to 'The Write Stuff'. This involves 1 spelling lesson, which incorporates 15 words, looking at sounds and exploring other words with the same sound associations. The spellings are then used throughout the 2 week cycle and children find words when reading and writing with the same sound associations. Following this, a further 5 lessons are taught lasting 15 minutes, recapping on sounds, prefixes, suffixes and other spelling rules.
EYFS
In EYFS, children have daily fine motor opportunities. This allows for teachers to continually check the process of children’s handwriting (pencil grip and letter formation). This allows for staff to give extra guidance where appropriate. Children use high quality texts and role play areas as a stimulus to write with a purpose, e.g. writing shopping lists, labelling characters and images. They will then develop this into writing instructions, simple punctuated sentences and use texts as a model for writing their own stories.
Impact
The organisation of the English curriculum has developed enthusiastic writers who enjoy showcasing their developing writing knowledge and skills. Children are confident to take risks in their writing, and love to discuss and share their ideas during English lessons. Outcomes of work in both English and topic books evidence the high quality of work and the impact of varied and cross-curricular writing opportunities. These enable children to write across a range of forms and adapt their writing successfully, considering the purpose.
Children are assessed regularly using their independent pieces of writing. Attainment at the end of EYFS, KS1 and KS2 is above that of the Local and National Average.
Children achieving greater depth is also above that of Local and National Average.
