Writing
Intent
At Woodlands Primary Academy, we strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. We maintain through each key stage and year group that we want our children to develop their vocabulary understanding, write in a range of different genres and continuously develop their spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. As well as this, we want our children to understand the spoken word, use expression and participate as a member of society by speaking fluently and articulately.
Implementation
To enable our children to write effectively and coherently we teach Writing using 'The Write Stuff' approach by Jane Considine. This approach is used from Year 1 to Year 6 and allows children to apply basic skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge to write effective sentences, which are full of impact and keep the reader interested. 'The Write Stuff' brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced though the 'Writing Rainbow', using the three zones of writing:
From 'The Writing Rainbow', symbols are used to support children within their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.
As part of the teaching sequence, teachers plan experience days; sentence stacking lessons and independent writing sequences. Experience days immerse children in experiences linked to their writing and drench them in vocabulary linked to the lenses in 'The Writing Rainbow'. From the experience days, children take part in the sentence stacking lessons. Sentence stacking lessons include effective demonstration writing from the teacher and the writing of three high-quality sentences with focuses on lenses of the rainbow. Children are also given the opportunity to 'Deepen The Moment' and add more to their writing using a lense of their choice. Independent writing sequences give children the opportunity to showcase everything they've learnt in their experience days and sentence stacking lessons.
In Reception, we use the P.I.C.C approach throughout our writing lessons. Texts on the writing LTP are taught over two weeks. The first phase is prediction which is key with predictions being reviewed and updated as the children become more familiar with the text. The children then interrogate the text by looking closely at vocabulary, grammar and answering reading questions. Ideas for writing are then captured through speaking and listening, research, role play, either modelled, shared or guided writing and taught SPAG. Children then create their writing with a huge emphasis on the teaching of redrafting and editing culminating in independent edit and redrafting. Throughout the entire sequence Oracy and Vocabulary skills are taught and opportunities to embed are provided.
Over their time at Woodlands, children will write a range of genres focused on high-quality texts. The chosen texts and genres cover a wide range of themes, including cultural, social and physical diversity. All fiction texts are explored through a central character, where the children put themselves in their position and focus on the highs and lows of story events and discuss the range of emotions from plot point to plot point.
Impact
Children will progress through and eventually leave Woodlands Primary Academy been able to;
- write for a range of purposes including diary entries, persuasion, story to name a few.
- use their vast knowledge vocabulary to excite, inform or entertain the reader.
- understand a range of punctuation and the effect it can have on the reader in both writing and reading.
- understand the various sentence types that can be used to support different genres.
- Spelling using their phonetic knowledge and spelling rules put in place.
- to speak clearly, fluently and coherently, to be able to listen attentively with understanding, pleasure and empathy and contribute to group discussions effectively.