“If you want to be a good writer, you must do two things above all things: read a lot and write a lot.”
Writing Intent
Our school curriculum is designed to enable our children to become respectful and successful adults in terms of being able to find employment in the future, to maintain healthy lifestyles and to be moral citizens. It is also designed to provide a relevant, progressive and well-structured academic curriculum which enables children to develop and master a broad knowledge and a wide range of skills. In order to develop links between reading and writing, high quality texts are used within the curriculum to provide opportunities for purposeful writing. Literacy is a key driver of our curriculum, allowing children to unlock the power of language both spoken and written.
- Our aim is to ensure that every child becomes confident, capable and enthusiastic writers who are provided with meaningful and exciting opportunities for writing.
- To promote and instil a love for reading, writing and high-quality literature into pupils at all ages.
- To derive an English curriculum, which develops the acquisition of knowledge and skills in line with the National Curriculum expectations.
Writing Implementation
By supporting vocabulary development across the curriculum, and encouraging children to use their reading experience, we develop children’s ability to communicate clearly and with expression in writing. We ensure that they have the transcription skills (spelling and handwriting) to support them in this. Children begin the writing process by looking at examples of the genre being studied and identifying the features of effective writing within this genre. They will use a ‘what a good one looks like’ (WAGOLL) model as a support in developing their writing style. We want children to understand that writing has a real purpose and audience and to enjoy sharing their writing with others. We provide children with experiences to develop their writing through visits and using books, pictures, film clips and other resources as a stimulus. Children are encouraged to use vocabulary from reading in their writing.
Children who may need adaptation to their learning, for example those children identified with Special Educational Needs or working below the age-related expectations, can be given additional resources to support with their writing such as:
- Visual aids
- Word specific banks
- Writing frames
- Use of ICT
- Sentence starters
As many of our children are new to English, we also use ‘Colourful Semantics’, a targeted approach to support children with their sentence building and to teach them about sentence structure. This is used to support those children with EAL and SEND.
Writing Impact
We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment is in line, or exceeds, their potential when we consider the varied starting points of all our children. We measure this using a range of materials, whilst always considering the age-related expectations for each year group. Children will make at least good progress in Reading, Writing and Speaking and Listening from their last point of statutory assessment, or from their starting point in Reception. We intend the impact of our English curriculum will ensure our pupils are academically prepared for life beyond primary school and throughout their educational journey.
Writing around our school.
Progression in Writing R to Y2
Progression in Writing Y2 to Y4
Progression in Writing Y4 to Y6