Writing Approach

Learning Intention

“There is a writer in everyone but not everyone’s stories are yet written. Writing is a way of collecting the narrative in your head and putting it down on paper. It is simply thinking through your fingers and painting with your words.”  Mrs Taylor-Duffy, Literacy Leader

At Meadowbank, our writing curriculum embeds the progression of developmental skills in Oracy, Grammar, Punctuation, Vocabulary and Knowledge from Early Years Foundation Stage to the end of Key Stage 2, through innovative and enriching teaching experiences. The cycle of learning is carefully designed to be meaningful to the children, making relevant links to their half-termly big questions and to the community and world around them. We believe that it is the quality of the journey, where the children are offered rich learning opportunities to develop skills and knowledge so that they have a clear purpose for writing. This is evident in the quality of the work they produce. The development of vocabulary and research plays an integral role in our teaching pedagogies for writing to best support the children to achieve their potential. We are ambitious for all children and expectations are limitless.

 

Aims

• To build on prior understanding and knowledge.
• To facilitate opportunities for creativity and independence.
• To underpin writing with fundamental grammar and punctuation skills
• To widen vocabulary and teach careful choices.
• To expose children to a wealth of texts.
• To make writing purposeful and meaningful.
• To model writing with the children and provide opportunities for “talk”.
• To set high expectations of all children.
• To encourage reflection and innovation of written pieces.

 

Learning Journey

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Writing is taught across the school linked to the half termly “big question” in each year group and allows for purposeful links to be made to reading and other subject disciplines within the curriculum, so children are fully immersed within their learning to empower them to be confident when articulating their learning.

Within Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, children are taught story writing using Tales Toolkit and Drawing club, aimed at developing skills and characteristics of effective learning including language, literacy, oracy and creativity. All the children are involved, allowing them to lead the stories they tell.

Across Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, skilled leaders have developed a sequenced approached to the teaching of writing, where children become immersed within the content and genre they are writing through stages. This is highly influenced by research methodologies, published by Emma Caulfield and Liz Chamberland, and the sharing of best practise. We also embed Rosenshine principles of instructions to best prepare children to be successful, independent writers.

‘Effective composition involves articulating and communicating ideas and then organising them coherently as a reader. This requires clarity, awareness of the audience, purpose and context and increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar…’  National Curriculum 2014.

 

How do we teach Writing?

Phase 1 – The Hook and Understanding as a Reader

This is the phase in which children are "hooked" into their learning and begin to understand the text as a reader - the children are immersed into the text genre and topic they will be exploring.

“…using these as hooks and new ways to stimulate the children gets them excited in a lesson and it’s this excitement and engagement means they’ll achieve most” (Paretti, 2013)

For example:

• They will read and sequence the text.
• They will discuss the characters and their emotions.
• They will retrieve key information.
• They will draw out information to summarise what they have read.
• They will make inferences about characters, themes and behaviours.

This is where the development of word understanding, inference, authors word choices and how meaning is enhanced, sequence of texts and retrieval of key information is embedded to show a true understanding.

 

Phase 2 – Understanding as Writer

This phase of our writing cycle is where the children are taught to understand the text they are exploring as a writer.

For example:

• They will explore the key features of the text genres.
• They will locate examples within texts.
• They will discuss the effect and purpose of the key features.
• They will analyse the layout and organisation.
• They will practise key grammatical structures and punctuation.
• They will be taught explicit ambitious vocabulary to widen their capital.

This is where teachers embed the analysis and exploration of structure, language and organisation; the development of knowledge, widening of vocabulary; and the practise and application of punctuation and grammar specific to the focus text genre.

 

Phase 3 – Composing and Editing

This phase of our writing cycle is where the children become the writer and apply skills and knowledge into composing their own piece of writing.

For example:

• They plan and map out their ideas.
• They work collaboratively or independently complete an extended writing piece.
• They read and edit paragraphs and sentence structures.
• They read and evaluate their own and others work using peer review structure.

This is where teachers embed the use of shared, modelled, supported and guided writing to build independence.

 

Learning Environment and Immersion

Reading and writing are promoted and celebrated across our school, where children are excited to share their learning with others; through displays, vocabulary and literature thus emphasising the importance of reading for writing, alongside reading for pleasure.

Our approach to an immersive curriculum allows fluent application to be made across the curricular allowing children to make purposeful links. The skills that children develop are linked to, and applied in, every subject - the skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening enable them to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work at school. Literacy skills are also highlighted and specifically targeted in reading and writing across the curriculum to enable the children to practise and embed their skills and write with a clear purpose.

 

Assessment for Learning

Writing assessments are captured through a collection of formation and summative approaches to inform teaching staff where the children are within the age related expectations.

In writing, these include: the use of the writing skills age related expectations; transitional meetings across class teachers at the end of each term; independent and group writing opportunities; moderation across classes, phrases and the schools in the ELT; profession discussions between leaders and class teachers, where the teaching sequence is evidenced clearly, adapted to suit the needs of individual classes. During these discussions, areas of strength and weakness with the class are discussed, working together to create actions to implement.

Personalised short term planning ensures that teachers plan for children to demonstrate their understanding of a wealth of different text genres, grammatical techniques and writing skills in a range of settings, and ensures that this enables them to show both their knowledge, application understanding and grammatical skills to the best of their ability. Feedback is given verbally to the children wherever possible to develop further discussion and to address the children’s misconceptions and make accelerated progress towards meeting and exceeding the age related expectations. Children regular respond to feedback at the point of learning.

 

Monitoring and review

The Literacy Leader is responsible for the rigorous monitoring and evaluating of reading and writing through school self-evaluation processes and systems. Ongoing analysis of outcomes enables the Literacy Leader to identify groups of children across school and support the teaching team in enabling all children to make accelerated progress. Feedback to the teaching team then informs next steps, where support is personalised, and effective continuing professional empowerment is planned, to address areas for development. Our children are also involved in the monitoring and evaluation process and are empowered to talk about their learning and experiences through a variety of children’s agency strategies.