Writing

It is our ambition that all of our children: develop a life-long enjoyment of writing; are able to write fluently so that they can communicate clearly; can develop their vocabulary understanding and are able to write for a purpose, across a range of genres.

The Write Stuff

Jane Considine’s The Write Stuff underpins our approach to the teaching of writing. The Write Stuff is based around teaching sequences that use both experience days,where children are given real life experiences linked to the subject of their writing to support the children to bring their writing to life, and sentence stacking lessons, where high quality teacher modelling is at the heart. 

Key aspects of The Write Stuff approach include:

• The Write Stuff builds pupils’ confidence with sentence structure. 

• The approach widens the repertoire of writing options for pupils. 

• Pupils gain an understanding of the ‘whole’ piece that they are writing. 

• Organisation of their ideas and cohesion between them is strengthened.

Children are exposed to a range of genres: fiction, non-fiction and poetry and are given the opportunity to write for a range of purposes and audiences. Within the writing lesson/sequence, contextualised Spelling Punctuation and Grammar (SPAG) is taught. Within sessions, children are also taught how to plan, edit and improve their work. 

Pupils  explore high level, rich vocabulary and are taught grammar in context through different writing lenses on the Writing Rainbow. There are three lenses used to support children with their writing: Fantastics – ideas for writing Grammaristics – tools for writing Boomtastics – writing techniques.

Our genre progression map ensures that all children access a range of writing genres throughout the year and key stage. Genres are revisited to deepen their understanding and skills are built upon over the year and across the year groups. Where possible, links are made to other curriculum areas ensuring that we allow for repetition of learning in a variety of contexts. 

Handwriting is taught daily following the requirements of the National Curriculum. Children in EYFS and KS1 are taught letter formation in line with the sequence of Little Wandle sounds. Children in Year 2 begin to join their handwriting and by the end of KS2, all children will have developed their own joined up handwriting style. Children who meet ARE for handwriting will use a handwriting pen. 

Assessment is ongoing throughout the unit and independent writing takes place at the end of each unit. In addition to this, we participate in No More Marking, a national comparative judgement tool. We use the data to inform future medium term plans.