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English - Writing

 

Writing at Windmill Primary School

 

At Windmill Primary School we believe that all children have the potential to become great writers. Being able to communicate ideas, thoughts and feelings through the written word is a life skill and we aim to inspire our children to love and appreciate the power of writing. We do this through giving them regular access to exciting and stimulating  texts to inspire them and to give them powerful models of high quality  writing.

 

Intent

We want our children:-

  • To develop a love of writing.

  • To become accomplished in knowing how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. 

  • To  be confident to explore and experiment with sentence structure and vocabulary so that their writing shows flair and creativity, 

  • To know how to use punctuation and grammar to control their sentences and structure their writing. 

  • To develop a rich vocabulary which they know how to use appropriately.

  • To have the skills and knowledge to make educated attempts at spelling new words that they meet.

  • To know how to spell high frequency words that don’t follow normal spelling patterns.

  • To know how to edit and improve their writing to produce high quality writing

  • Toi develop a fluent and neat cursive style of handwriting.

 

Implementation

At Windmill Primary School we teach a mastery approach to writing through “sentence stacking” which is a structured modelling of the writing process. (This approach is from The Write Stuff , which has been developed by Jane Considine).

  • All units of writing start with a high quality text that the children read and analyse to identify the features of a particular genre of writing. This includes types of sentence and grammatical features as well as vocabulary choices.

  • The children will be given experiences of drama. role play, story telling , visual stimuli and opportunities to “talk in order ”to build opportunities to rehearse sentence structure and the use of new vocabulary.

  • When they start the writing process, the children will first be given a chance to collect and gather their ideas for the chunk that they will be writing (initiate stage). Each sentence is then modelled, edited  and deepened by the teacher to ensure that it is of a high quality (model stage). The children will then write their own sentence chunk, applying what they have been taught (enable.) The sentences they write will be linked to the FANTASTICs, Boombastic and Grammaristics that are part of the Write Stuff approach. (For more detail see The Write Stuff Approach to Writing)

  • Where possible feedback to individual children will be immediate and targeted on specific areas of improvement. Children can then respond immediately to the feedback that they have received.

  • The children will be taught grammar through  the modelled sentence approach so that they learn to embed it into a context. 

  • The children will see visual maps of what different text types look like to help them when they are writing independently.

  • Each unit of work will end with the children have an opportunity to write an independent piece within the same genre.

  • The children will have lots of opportunities to write for real life purposes.

  • Children will have opportunities to publish their work.

 

Impact

By the time the children move onto secondary school we want them to be masters of the writing process:-

  • The children will be confident writers who take pride in their accomplishments and have a love of writing.

  • Attainment and progress of writing will be high for all children with more children achieving age related expectations.

  • Children will have the tools to be able to apply their writing skills across all subject areas.

  • Children will understand and apply the skill of editing at all times when they are writing and know that is a sign of a good writer.