The Teaching of Writing

Our Vision for Writing

Our writing curriculum aims to equip all children with the skills & knowledge to enable them to lead a happy, healthy & purposeful life.

We aim to support all children to establish a purpose and love for writing.

Communication and listening skills are an essential part of the curriculum and we believe that creative ideas should be shared and celebrated with others.

In order to create fluent writers, we have created our own writing journey, based upon the national curriculum aims, which builds up a strong foundation of basic skills in FS and KS1. This journey continues to develop and grow throughout KS2. Our writing is taught using ‘The Write Stuff’ approach created by Jane Considine.

Content and Sequencing

Our Writing Journey, developed by school, begins in Nursery and builds up to Year 6 objectives – it has been constructed to focus on basic grammar and sentence writing objectives that we believe to be essential in creating confident writers at Belfield.

Our writing is always inspired by challenging texts and has a clear purpose for writing understanding the Reason, Audience, Features and Tone (RAFT). Writing is planned using ‘The Write Stuff’ approach which uses lenses from a writing rainbow that relates to our writing journey objectives. Real life experience days are used to enhance writing and aim to create ‘hooks’ into writing (e.g. owls, circus skills, educational visits). At the beginning of each half term, up to one week will be dedicated to pre-teaching grammatical features based upon the upcoming features found within the next genre of writing.

Teachers will follow the genre progression document to enable all children to broaden their genre understanding and build upon their previous year groups knowledge.

The level of scaffolding and modelling is significantly reduced as you move throughout school. In Year 6, children will explore text types and purpose, language, vocabulary exploration, grammatical aspects of text type, common features and impact. Teachers will share modelled writing and exemplified models which will support children to independently produce their own piece of writing. Children have the opportunity to edit their work daily following the editing process E1, E2 and E3 and they use a purple polish pen. Editing is an essential writing skill that is taught by all staff throughout the school and is usually acted upon in response to teacher or peer comments. Editing in Year 2 and 6 is encouraged to be acted upon independently, which allows children to gain the greater depth standard in KS1 and expected standard or greater depth in KS2. Handwriting is taught in discrete lessons, using the Penpals scheme. We aim for children to gain a pen licence by the end of LKS2, though we believe that children should have a choice over whether they write in pen or pencil. Spelling is also taught in discrete lessons: this takes the form of Phonic sessions in FS and Year 1. In Year 2-6, Support for Spelling is used to help teach spellings patterns in a sequenced way. Moderation is an important element of the writing curriculum. We moderate across school using exemplifications to ensure progression towards ARE is appropriate; moderation is also held for each year group with the IPLCN. KS1/2 also take part in LA moderation workshops. We also have a LA moderator working at Belfield. We were moderated at KS1 in 2022 and in KS2 in 2019 and all judgements were agreed.

Links across the curriculum

Writing is linked to the text being read in English lessons- vocabulary has a significant focus throughout all subjects and is displayed all around the school environment.

Within each year group, a text is chosen to link to other topic areas such as history, geography and science to reflect the importance of collecting and applying new vocabulary terms.

E.g.

Reception- Science related non-chronological report about Seeds

Year 2- History related instructional text about the Titanic

Year 5- Science related biography based on Katherine Johnson

Writing Session Yr1-5

Vocabulary is gathered on a thinking side

Choose suitable and technical word choices

Teacher models sentences

Children write independent sentences using thinking side

Children are challenged to deepen the moment using other writing rainbow symbols.

Children from year 1- 5 write one paragraph per session

Draft and write own independent piece at the end of a unit of work.

Edit writing assessment using E1, E2 and E3.

Progress/assessment

We follow our developed Writing Journey to assess and monitor progress (in KS1/2 TA framework is used).

2023 Data

KS1-

Writing – EXS 63%    GDS 2%

KS2-

Writing- EXS 76%    GDS  4%

Support

All children are expected to learn to write.

Support is tailored to children’s individual needs, focusing on using scaffolding approaches through providing vocabulary thinking sides as well as scaffolded sentence stems.

Interventions offered are focused on spelling, punctuation and grammar. Identifying errors in sentence structure. Schemes such as IDL are used.

Whole school targets

To increase the number of children reaching GDS at the end of KS1 and KS2.