Writing

English Lead - Mrs Goldsworthy-Linnell

At St Marie's, we deliver a high-quality English writing curriculum which develops and fosters a whole school love of writing.  We make links between our chosen core texts and our Catholic Social Teaching themes and Fundamental British values.  We write with links to our texts and our foundation subjects.

In whole class sessions, we use a range of talk rich activities to ensure all children are actively learning and engaged within English lessons.  

National Curriculum objectives are tracked by teachers through their planning to ensure coverage of all skills and knowledge in all areas of the writing scheme of work; spelling, handwriting, writing composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation.  Planning is scaffolded and adapted to meet the writing needs of all learner groups.

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Intent:

At St Marie's, writing is planned and taught using focus CLPE core texts.  These texts are chosen by teachers with consideration of their class cohort needs. Sequential and coherent planning immerses children within a writing style that they can independently produce at the end of the lesson sequence.  The children are taken on a journey to become immersed in the writing style.

Through CLPE activities and Talk For Learning strategies, we create a talk rich environment to develop pupils vocabulary and language knowledge and skills for independent writing.  We have a poetry focus every term to build and develop pupils range of word and language patterns for independent writing.

Using Letterjoin programme, we plan sequential and coherent handwriting lessons to ensure children develop a legible and fluent cursive script.

We follow the Spelling shed scheme of work to plan sequential and coherent spelling lessons to ensure children become more accurate spellers.

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Implementation:

Teachers plan a half termly overview of their teaching and learning of writing, this has focused writing outcomes as well as plotted weekly GPS objectives.

With a writing outcome focus, each lesson focusses on a manageable step of new learning based on the National Curriculum Writing Scheme of work.

What a typical lesson looks like:

Flashback: an opportunity for pupils to retrieve and build upon previously acquired skills, through a ‘Last Lesson, Last Unit, Last Year, Challenge’ approach.

Teach it: Introduction to new learning with live modelling and explicit addressing of potential misconceptions.

Practise it: Children are given the opportunity to practise and use new transcription and composition writing skills. Learning can be independent and collaborative, all pupils participate through active learning strategies.

Prove it:  Children apply new knowledge and writing skills: spelling, handwriting, writing composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation.  These skills are developed and practised in a focused writing style eg. informal letter, persuasive argument.

Dig deeper: To ensure all children are appropriately challenged, the primary national curriculum writing scheme of work is used to plan activities to enable all children to extend their learning forward, broaden their knowledge and make progress at their level.

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Impact:

We deliver opportunities for all skills to be learnt and developed and we give children time to practise and build on their own writing.  It is important to us that our learners are exposed to a variety of learning resources and writing style examples across all areas of the curriculum

Texts used in whole class teaching often focus on texts which are just slightly above the reading level of the children in the class to ensure progression is made and high aspirations set.

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Assessment

Assessment happens in every lesson using live marking.  Children are given learning next steps to develop and move their learning forward. Writing is assessed formally by the class teacher termly.  Teachers use Bromcom to record their assessment of writing and follow this up with pupil progress meetings.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Review

Teaching and learning of writing is captured through: Lesson drop ins, pupil voice, book looks, planning monitoring, NC objectives coverage monitoring, data drops (termly) and pupil progress follow up, internal and MAC moderation and staff coaching opportunities.

EYFS Long Term Plan

Year 1-6 Long Term PlanHandwriting Long Term Plan