Writing
Intent
At Weedon Bec Primary School, we believe that English is the key to education and to life-long learning. The skills children learn in English will enable them to communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions through their writing. Our aim is that children learn to read, write and speak with confidence. We want pupils to acquire confidence, stamina, broad vocabulary, an understanding of structure and a solid understanding of grammar and be able to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they learn throughout their time in primary school. We want them to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.
We believe that all pupils should be encouraged to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in part by developing a fluent, joined, handwriting style by the time they move to secondary school. We believe that all good writers refine and edit their writing over time, so we strive for our children to develop independence in being able to identify their own areas for improvement in all pieces of writing, editing their work effectively during and after the writing process. We understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their children, and we encourage parental support with spelling practice.
Implementation
All children take part in 4 writing sessions a week, which are supplemented with writing opportunities across the curriculum. At Weedon, we have adopted Jane Considine’s ‘The Write Stuff’, using a clear and systematic approach to the teaching of writing. This starts in EYFS and continues to Year 6. This step-by-step framework builds pupils’ confidence using a method known as ‘sentence stacking’. Using high quality modelling, sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can immediately apply to their own writing. An individual lesson is broken down into three learning chunks, made up of three sections:
- Initiate - a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model - the teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable - the children write their sentences following the model.
Throughout their time at Weedon, our children are exposed to a range of genres. Our long-term plan has been mapped out to provide opportunities for children to build on knowledge and skills and ensure that a variety of genres are progressively taught.
Presentation is very important to us. We use a cursive approach to handwriting, where children learn to develop a legible, fluent and comfortable style. This cursive style is modelled by teachers when marking children’s work and writing on the board. This is taught from Year 2, once their letter formation is well embedded, using the Read Write Inc handwriting to match their phonics knowledge and letter knowledge.
We follow a progressive spelling programme called Spelling Shed, building on phonics knowledge and skills. In KS1 and KS2, children explore spelling patterns and rules, carrying out investigations and revision activities. From Year 2, children are also taught to use dictionaries and in KS2 they also use thesauruses to support their spelling and proof-reading skills.
Impact
Pupils across the school are proud of the writing they produce and enjoy reading it aloud and sharing with both peers and adults. Pupils will enjoy writing across a range of genres and all abilities will be able to succeed in all English lessons because work will be thoroughly modelled and appropriately scaffolded. Pupils will have a wide vocabulary that they use within their writing. Pupils will leave primary school being able to effectively apply spelling rules and patterns they have been taught. The impact is monitored half-termly through individual pupil writing assessments, which provide the children with an opportunity to showcase their prior learning and that of the unit completed.