Writing

Intent

At Doveridge Primary School we believe that writing is a key skill for life both inside and out of education and that is why it features across all the subjects taught across our school. Our aim is to provide children with key transferrable writing skills to build on year on year, that can be used throughout each phase of their education and prepare them for secondary school.

Teaching children to write for a range of purposes and audiences can be very exciting, especially when we provide children with a range of engaging hooks to capture their imagination! We aim to provide the children with varied reasons for writing and believe that this not only produces higher quality writing, but allows our learners to apply their skills to a range of different contexts.

Writing across all subject areas will prepare our children for high school and the more in-depth approach to analysing, planning and innovating their writing.

Oracy is prioritised in our writing curriculum in order to build vocabulary for all learners and increase understanding of trickier texts used across our curriculum. Discussion, questioning and learning texts with actions all increase understanding and prepare our children with the tools they need in order to be successful in their writing. Our aim is for ALL learners to achieve their full potential in writing and we are committed to providing the scaffolds and challenge needed in order for our children to achieve this.

Implementation

Our pupils receive a one hour Literacy lesson daily in Key Stage 1 and 2 during which they are exposed to age-related expectations and skills to develop in their writing through a range of texts which are taught using the Talk for Writing approach. Writing and reading are closely linked and we ensure that children are reading daily in order to build on their knowledge of different genres of writing and develop their vocabulary. 

All teachers plan writing units which encourages plenty of oracy – this means discussion, questioning, imitating and learning texts along with actions that are rich with key skills. Through a structured block of work, the children are encouraged to deconstruct texts and identify key features for specific genres of writing and the teachers demonstrate high quality modelling through the Talk for Writing approach, practising these skills which the children then apply in their own writing. Through daily support, the teachers encourage the children to include key vocabulary to structure their work appropriately into coherent paragraphs and use the grammatical skills and punctuation taught at their year group level. This ability to identify specific features we believe is a key skill across both reading and writing and will improve comprehension in children. As a school, we ensure that genres of writing studied run alongside the learning taking place in Guided reading so that children are fully immersed in the text type.

Writing Skills ladder

Look at some examples of our beautiful writing!

At Doveridge Primary School we intend to develop writing as a transferrable skill across all subjects taught in the curriculum. We therefore immerse children in a termly History/Geography themed topic and encourage cross-curricular links. Our aim is to provide engaging writing hooks that are linked to each termly topic to give children an audience and purpose for writing. Children are expected to transfer their key topic knowledge and vocabulary into their writing and vice versa to transfer their spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge into their topic work. We expect the high standards for writing in Literacy lessons to be evident within the work in all books.

We use success criteria and age related expectation prompts such as punctuation and conjunction pyramids to ensure that children are aware of their strengths and areas for development in writing so that they can take ownership of their progress. Teachers leave next steps in books when marking to ensure that children know exactly what they need to do next to make progress in their writing and children are encouraged to respond. We ensure that ALL learners are given next steps and that scaffolds and challenges are put in place for those children working below or above age-related outcomes.

Children who are identified as not achieving age-related outcomes and/or those on the SEN register may be assessed against the outcomes for the year group below. Daily interventions/support may be put in place in order to accelerate writing skills in this case. The nature of the intervention will be decided by the teacher and the SENDCO. Support in class may include small group work with an adult during lessons to model key skills, scaffolds created by the teacher to assist with completion of work and word banks/sentence openers provided to assist the child when writing.

 Impact

Assessment in writing is ongoing as teachers carry out in-depth assessment of children’s writing at the end of each unit with a piece which is written in the pupils ‘Aim Higher’ book, which highlights the age-related outcomes that have been achieved.

Children are tested termly on spelling, grammar and punctuation and this data is used to inform next steps for writing.

We use iTrack data management system to record assessment outcomes and analyse gaps in children’s knowledge. In addition, we also gain an overview of specific groups of children across school and can plan intervention support where needed.

Progress across classes is closely monitored by the subject leader and Headteacher. Monitoring will include: regular book trawls, lesson observations, gathering evidence of good practice, pupil voice interviews, looking at data on iTrack and regular learning walks. This can be internally, with named governors, or with colleagues in our cluster school.

The findings of this monitoring will be used to inform next steps for the children and the implementation of writing across the school as a whole.