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PreshuteEnglish- Writing
Intent- writing
We believe that writing is a key skill for life and therefore features across our curriculum. We aim to provide children with transferrable skills, developing their ability to produce well-structured, detailed writing for a range of purposes and audience, paying particular attention year on year to the formal structures of English: grammatical detail, punctuation, vocabulary and spelling.
Implementation
At Preshute Primary School, we teach the key knowledge and skills of writing from the National Curriculum, stimulating the children through a range of engaging hooks to capture their imagination – from experience days, using artefacts, key texts, books, music and film clips. We have adopted the approach to teaching writing from "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine. This also echoes the importance of using high quality texts to explore and model writing alongside providing clarity to the mechanics of writing.
There is a structured approach for planning and producing writing, beginning with the use of a WAGOLL (what a good one looks like) as an example of how to be successful at the start of each unit of work and provides children with an end goal. Children are encouraged to use this as a structure but also innovate their writing to make it their own. Teachers ensure that the standard of writing in the WAGOLL reflects the age-related outcomes for each specific year group.
The children will then experiment with sentence structures using ‘Sentence Stacking’, which enables children to write in short intensive bursts, which builds over time, then are able to immediately apply to their own writing.
Units of work are based around a key text or book. An individual lesson focuses on constructing sentences, broken into ‘chunks’. Each learning chunk has three sections:
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills/knowledge and apply these to their writing.
Oracy is prioritised in our writing curriculum in order to build vocabulary for all learners and increase understanding of high quality texts used across our curriculum. Discussion, questioning and learning texts by using 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.
Jane Considene Overview of units
English Writing units for 2021-2022
Impact
Children start each unit of writing by producing a ‘cold write’ that forms assessment of their understanding of the text type and areas for development. There then follows series of structured lessons which develop their skills and knowledge in order to plan and create a final piece independently. This is a ‘hot write’, where the children develop their own success criteria to be able to write a piece showcasing the features and techniques learnt.
Therefore, assessment in writing is ongoing as teachers highlight the age-related outcomes that have been achieved, which are recorded in our tracking system.
Progress is also closely monitored by the writing lead and senior leadership team. Monitoring will include: regular book looks, lesson observations, gathering evidence of good practice, 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
Curriculum booklets
Year 3 and 4 Spelling Appendix
Year 5 and 6 Spelling Appendix