Writing
Intent:
At Holywell, we are all WRITERS. We believe that writing is a key skill for life both inside and out of education and that is why it features across all the subjects taught across our school. Our aim is to provide children with key transferrable writing skills to build on year on year, that can be used throughout each phase of their education, prepare them for secondary school and beyond.
Teaching children to write for a range of purposes and audiences can be very exciting, especially where we provide children with a range of engaging hooks to capture their imagination! We aim to provide the children with varied reasons for writing and believe that this not only produces higher quality writing, but allows our learners to apply their skills to a range of different contexts.
Writing across all subject areas will prepare our children for secondary school and the more in-depth approach to analysing, planning and innovating their writing.
Oracy is prioritised in our writing curriculum in order to build vocabulary for all learners and increase understanding of trickier texts used across our curriculum.
Discussion, questioning and learning texts with actions all increase understanding and prepare our children with the tools they need in order to be successful in their writing.
Our aim is for ALL learners to achieve their full potential in writing and we are committed to providing the scaffolds and challenge needed in order for our children to achieve this. We have high expectations of all children and we encourage children to challenge themselves, persevere and pursue success – to ‘let their light shine’.
Implementation:
Our teachers use the National Curriculum, Read, Write Inc and Acclerated reader for as a basis for planning.
- Children receive English lessons daily and are exposed to age-related expectations for writing within a range of texts.
- Writing and reading are closely linked and we ensure that children are reading daily in order to build on their knowledge of different genres of writing and develop their vocabulary.
- All classes use a Talk4Writing structure to plan writing units which encourages plenty of oracy – this means discussion, questioning, imitating and learning texts along with actions that are rich with key skills.
- A high standard of joined, cursive handwriting is modelled across school and children are encouraged to imitate this.
- Handwriting is taught and practised regularly but is expected to be evidenced throughout all work produced.
- Teachers demonstrate high quality modelling within each lesson and encourage children to include key vocabulary (linked to their Topic), structure their work appropriately into coherent paragraphs and use the grammatical skills and punctuation taught at their year group level.
- We intend to develop writing as a transferrable skill across all subjects taught in the curriculum. We therefore immerse children in a termly History/Geography themed topic and encourage cross-curricular links. Our aim is to provide engaging writing hooks that are linked to each termly topic to give children an audience and purpose for writing. Children are expected to transfer their key topic knowledge and vocabulary into their writing and vice versa to transfer their spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge into their topic work. We expect the high standards for writing in Literacy lessons to be evident within the work in all books.
- Children are encouraged to deconstruct texts and identify key features for specific genres of writing. Teachers model the practising of these skills and children then apply them to their own writing. This ability to identify specific features we believe is a key skill across both reading and writing and will improve comprehension in children. As a school, we ensure that genres of writing studied run alongside the learning taking place in Guided reading so that children are fully immersed in the text type.
- We ensure that children are aware of their strengths and areas for development in writing so that learners can take ownership of their progress. Teachers leave next steps in books when marking to ensure that children know exactly what they need to do next to make progress in their writing and children are encouraged to respond to this in purple pen.
- Children who are identified as not achieving age-related outcomes and/or those on the SEND register will receive interventions and support. The nature of the intervention will be decided by the teacher and the SENDCO. Support in class may include small group work with an adult during lessons to model key skills, scaffolds created by the teacher to assist with completion of work and word banks/sentence openers provided to assist the child when writing
Impact:
Assessment in writing is ongoing as teachers carry out assessment of children’s writing at the end of each unit, and highlight the age-related outcomes that have been achieved.
Children are tested twice a year on spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge and this data is used to inform next steps for writing.
Progress across classes is closely monitored by the head and subject leader. Monitoring will include: regular book looks, lesson observations, pupil progress meetings, pupil voice interviews, looking at data and regular learning walks.
The findings of this monitoring will be used to inform next steps for the children and the implementation of writing across the school as a whole.
The % of pupils working at age related expectations and above age related expectations within each year group will be at least in line with national averages and will match the ambitious targets of individual children.
There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (e.g. disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged).