Intent
Writing is a crucial part of the curriculum at St Mary’s Our core objective is to foster a love of writing and to be able to express their thoughts and ideas with clarity and creativity through the use of a wide vocabulary informed by high-quality reading texts and bespoke strategies. We also intend to create writers who can re-read, edit and improve their own writing, and confidently use the essential skills of grammar, punctuation and spelling. We set high expectations for all our children to take pride in their work and have a fluent, cursive handwriting style alongside allowing their imaginations to flourish.
Implementation
In order to help us to develop confident, enthusiastic writers who can express themselves with confidence and strong vocabulary, we develop very close links between writing, reading and our wider curriculum. This provides our children with regular opportunities to write in a range of styles and for a range of purposes and audiences. Writing tasks are specific and meaningful, and often meet a purpose to engage children and to illustrate how their writing skills can be applied to real life contexts.
Our approach to teaching Writing is through clear, structured, daily Literacy lessons. Teachers use engaging texts and topics to inspire their writing. In each lesson, the teaching of vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, speaking and listening objectives are interwoven so that children have the opportunity to learn these features in context. All lessons build up to a piece of Independent Writing at the end of a unit of work. This enables teachers to assess the children’s writing and inform future teaching needs. Children are given time to plan, draft, edit and improve their written work, using feedback from teachers and peers to support them.
Children learn spellings at home each week and these are tested in school. Spelling rules are taught explicitly.
Impact
The impact of our writing curriculum is sustained progress, learning and transferrable skills across all subjects and disciplines for our children. With the implementation of the writing journey being well established and taught consistently and thoroughly in both key stages, children are confident writers. By the time they are in upper Key Stage 2, most genres of writing are familiar to them and teaching can focus on creativity, writer’s craft, sustained writing and manipulation of grammar and punctuation skills to suit purpose, organisation and audience. By the end of Year Six, children will be able to write clearly, accurately and adapt their language and style appropriately. Our pupils will acquire a wide vocabulary and have a strong command of the written word. Most importantly, they will develop a love of writing and be well equipped for the rest of their education.