Intent
At Castle Primary School, we want all of our children to become accurate, independent and creative writers.
At Castle, we want to inspire the children’s love of literacy and enable them to become creative writers. We teach our pupils to speak clearly, to convey their ideas with fluency and to present their work with pride. We have worked hard to equip our children with rich and varied learning opportunities which will allow them to become enthusiastic and confident writers. Through our English curriculum, we teach the children how important the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing will be in the real world. This supports our children to understand the value of English to them now and in their future lives.
Our vocabulary rich approach to writing provides a basis for much of our teaching in literacy sessions. The children are immersed in carefully-crafted texts, which enables them to become familiar with a richer and more diverse range of new vocabulary and sentence structures upon which they can innovate and invent.
We believe that nurturing the quality and variety of language that pupils hear and speak is vital to developing their vocabulary, grammatical understanding and ability to write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within different subjects. Our current curriculum is built on vocabulary-rich texts, where children are taught to understand diverse and rich language that they need for a particular topic, before they start writing. A range of quality texts are used to inspire the children and these are then analysed through reading and discussion. This acts as a creative springboard allowing the children to develop a wealth of their own imaginative ideas before putting pen to paper.
Our writing curriculum is driven by the 2014 National Curriculum English programmes of study. The aims of this are to ensure all pupils:
- acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
- appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
- write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
- use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
- are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate
Implementation
- At Castle we have developed clear progressions for both fiction and nonfiction writing. This ensures breadth to our writing curriculum that covers the four main text types: writing to explain, persuade, inform or entertain. This sits alongside our clear grammar progression that allows our children to be taught new grammatical concepts in a logical order.
- Our writing units all follow a systematic three phase teaching sequence that is driven by a quality text. A ‘child speak’ version of the teaching sequence is shared with the children and displayed in their classroom. This enables the children to visually see where they are on their learning journey and the destination piece of writing that they are heading towards.
- Phase 1 has an opening experience to engage the children and allow them to explore the model text. Phase 2 focuses on teaching the children new skills and revising teaching content from previous units. Phase 3 supports the children to produce a final piece of writing as their outcome from the unit. Some possible activities in each phase are suggested below.
- At Castle we believe that it is of vital importance that the children are given the opportunity to write as frequently as possible and not just produce a final polished piece of writing at the end of a unit of work. In each phase short writing opportunities are planned for that allow the children to revisit text types from other units. This not only allows the children to explore ideas, themes or characters from their current unit in more depth, but also provides a fantastic opportunity to practise skills from their prior learning. Discrete grammar learning is also planned for, to introduce new concepts, but wherever possible this is contextualised within the unit to have a greater impact upon the children’s learning. Although at Castle Primary, writing is taught as a discrete lesson, often teachers are able to make links to draw in learning from both guided reading lessons and themes from their current history or geography topic. This provides the children with the opportunity to explore and practise their learning from writing lessons, in other areas of the curriculum.
Impact
The impact of writing at Castle is seen in a number of ways.
- Children are confident writers who share their understanding of the world through the written word.
- Children freely write for pleasure.
- Creative and factual writing are both valued equally across the wider school
- Children love to write and to edit their own and peer work to support personal their growth.
