Writing

Intent

At St. John’s, we place importance on developing writing in order for our children to communicate their ideas and emotions to others. We promote high standards of literacy and language to ensure children can write effectively for different purposes. Our intention is to enable all children to be confident writers and have the tools to encapsulate what they want to say using effective grammar and vocabulary. At St John’s, we celebrate diversity and aim for this to be reflected in the quality reading texts we use for our Topic and Writing work. The children are provided with many opportunities to write with purpose, across the curriculum. We intend for pupils to be able to regularly plan, revise and evaluate their writing through a process of drafting and editing and to give them the skills to write effectively for different audiences.

Implementation

At St John’s, we have many exciting opportunities to inspire children’s writing. We use varied stimulus to help children use their imagination within their writing; film, music, imagery, talk, literature, play and educational visits. The children are taught a wide range of writing genre to enable them to meet all the objectives within their year group and are taught to high expectations from each adult in school.

Quality texts are used so that children can see good examples of writing and emulate this skill in their own work. Children learn to write using the Read, Write Inc. principles and practise handwriting daily. Opportunities for writing are given through English lessons, but also in other lessons including RE, topic and reading.

Writing is planned into 3-week cycles –

Week one

Children use drama, discussion and various stimulus to engage fully with a quality text. They plan their writing through story mountains, story maps and a non-fiction planning ‘burger’ planning sheet.

Week two

Children plan their sentences through a dictate and create system.

Dictate – The teacher will use the MTYT (My Turn Your Turn) method for children to remember a sentence and be able to hold the sentence in their heads. When the teacher is confident that the children can remember the sentence, s/he then writes the sentence on the board checking spelling, punctuation and grammar and checking the accuracy against a checklist. The children watch. The teacher then covers the sentence and the children write it down. When the children have finished writing their own, the teacher will display the sentence they wrote again and all the class ‘tick and fix’ against the checklist, using a purple pen for accuracy.

Create – The children then have the opportunity to create their own sentence using the same structure as the previous one. The children tick and fix independently and they have the opportunity to read out their work for the rest of the class. The children also sometimes use peer checking / marking to help each other with their work. The teachers and teaching assistants will use a pink pen to highlight mistakes so the children can correct them or highlight parts of the sentence in green to show correct work.

Week three

Children use the sentences they have ‘created’ in week 2 to write a full piece. At the end of week three, the children can write up their piece of writing in a final best piece of work.

Impact

By the end of their time at St. John’s, our children will have been equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to write effective and imaginative pieces of work. Through daily English lessons, our children will have an excellent understanding of grammar, spelling and punctuation to give them the tool kit to express themselves through their writing. Children will have a range of vocabulary to choose from and they will use this to be effective writers in a variety of genre. By the end of Year Six they will be able to write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.