Writing

Approach to Writing

Writing is celebrated in every classroom through the Writing Wall Display which showcases each child’s writing journey and progress throughout the year, with a new quality piece of writing added each half term.   

 

Children are given opportunities to write for real purposes across the curriculum, covering a range of genres. This may include writing to inform, persuade, discuss or entertain, and often include a specific audience. These writing tasks may be tailored to children’s interests thus inspiring creativity and enjoyment. Examples of cross-curricular writing are celebrated through displays in classrooms and around the school.  

 

Writing units often start with a hook to inspire interest and engagement for example through the use of story sacks, scavenger hunts, props, pictures, and video clips. Keywords and ambitious vocabulary are explored and displayed promoting a vocabulary rich environment which values the spoken and written word.  

 

Each term begins with an English unit which is based on book-led planning using the Take One Book approach where a quality picture book is used to generate discussion. Key writing objectives are revised and practiced that lead to a range of short cross-genre outcomes inspired by the book.  

 

English units are driven by high quality ‘texts that teach’ and quality model texts that are deliberately chosen in order to promote a firm understanding of age-related writing, grammar, and vocabulary which can then be applied independently. Where appropriate a ‘Talk for Writing’ approach is used across the school to encourage oral rehearsal of sentence structures and provides a clear model for writing: imitate – innovate – invent. Writing is modeled through ‘thinking aloud’ strategies which encourage proofreading and editing skills throughout the process of writing.