Our Writing
Intent
At Bentley New Village Primary School, we believe that writing is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become competent with the life skills required for writing, to ensure the best possible opportunities are available in the children’s future and to allow them to develop the life skills sentence structures, punctuation, grammar, spelling and handwriting.
At the heart of our writing sequence is our drive to engage children in activities that incorporate imaginative thinking, real life scenarios, emotionally and physically diverse ideas, facts and thought provoking events, whilst also developing each child’s language, spoken language, and vocabulary understanding and use. We strive to raise the importance of writing amongst the community by ensuring our children are writing for real life audiences, with an expectation that a reply is received.
Writing is a skill that enables children to communicate their learning across the wider curriculum and lays the foundations for success in future lines of study and employment. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of writing in order to close any gaps and to target the highest possible number of children attaining the expected standard or higher.
We have high expectations of all children and we encourage them to challenge themselves, show a resilience and determination to succeed and to show creativity and co-operation within their writing sessions.
Implementation
As part of this planning process, teachers need to plan the following:
KS1:
- A session introducing and incorporating a good example of the text genre expected as an outcome. Children will then have a practise using the week’s taught Grammar skill
- One or two sessions building the language, spoken language and vocabulary skills to be confident speakers. Children will use new words in context within their writing.
- Shared write following the expectation of the genre, use the skill that has been taught in the last two days. Children to then have a go themselves
- Children to independently write following the genre
- Children to be grouped to edit and improve their work before teacher marks.
KS2:
- A session introducing and incorporating a good example of the text genre expected as an outcome.
- One or two sessions building the language, spoken language and vocabulary skills to be confident speakers. Children will use new words in context within their writing.
- Sessions based on the skills of writing.
- Modelled sessions allowing the children to hear the teachers’ thought processes. Children then complete a practise writes using another context
- Sessions based on the skills of planning for a piece of written work to raise the importance.
- A session where children can plan their own writing.
- A fully independent session, asking children to write to the audience, genre and purpose required – using the taught vocabulary.
- An editing session prior to teacher marking.
- A teacher or TA marked piece of work with relevant and progressive feedback.
Impact
Our writing sequence is of a high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress.
In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- Words per minute assessment.
- Practise writes throughout our teaching sequence
- Daily marking.
- Writing in other curriculum subjects.
- Unaided writing opportunities are planned throughout the year for teacher assessment
The unaided write is planned to provide
- Day one- a hook to the genre with audience and purpose , features of the genre
- Day two- children to plan their writing
- Day three- children to redraft plan and begin writing
- Day four- children to finish writing
- Day five- children to edit and improve before teacher marking
