Writing

All Saints’ Church of England Primary School

Writing

By providing our pupils with stimulating learning opportunities we want them to develop into independent writers who can produce texts that are engaging, neatly presented and accurate in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

What are our aims?

We aim to develop children into fluent and confident readers. We strive for our pupils to develop a love of reading and for them to be able to use their skills to independently discover new facts about things they are interested in.

How is Writing taught?

Writing skills are taught on a daily basis in all year groups as part of each literacy lesson. During these lessons, sentence and word level objectives (as outlined in the 2014 in the National Curriculum) are taught in relation to the study of high quality texts.

At least one literacy lesson a week is taught in each year group that concentrates fully on a specific spelling, punctuation or grammar objective.

Children in years 2 -6 build on the phonics work covered in the EYFS and Year 1 by learning spelling rules and patterns.

To develop handwriting in school, each child is expected to receive at least one handwriting session every week and staff use the Treasure House scheme as a starting point to deliver age appropriate handwriting activities.

Writing also continues to be an integral part of our Learning Challenge Curriculum and our pupils apply their skills to write about the exciting topics they learn about.

How is Writing assessed?

Throughout the year children are set a range of independent writing activities to assess the progress they are making against the standards set out for each year group in the National Curriculum. From these assessments it can be judged as to whether each child is working towards the expected standard for their year group, working at the expected standard or working at greater depth within the expected standard.  All of the teachers regularly meet to moderate writing across the school to ensure consistency in our assessments.

Children in the Early Years are assessed in their writing development against the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. This will provide on entry data which the teacher will use to plan an appropriate curriculum that: caters for the needs of each child, takes account of skills/ concepts already mastered, refers to the Early Learning Goals and prepares the child for their entry to the National Curriculum. 

Resources

• Units of work for high quality texts such as The lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch, Fizzlebert Stump and Far From Home enable teachers to deliver many of the writing objectives to pupils in a stimulating and challenging manner.
• Collins Treasure House Handwriting and Vocabulary, Grammar and Punctuation books are used to support the teaching of these skills.
• We access resources from our online subscriptions to Spelling and Grammar Bug and Education City.
• The Spelling Zone programme is used to teach new spelling rules to years 2, 3 and 4.

How can you support your child at home?

• Practise and learn weekly spelling lists – make it fun!
• Encourage opportunities for writing, such as letters to family or friends, shopping lists, notes or reminders, stories or poems.
• Write together – be a good role model for writing.
• Encourage use of a dictionary to check spelling.
• Allow your child to use a computer for word processing which encourages editing.
• Remember that good readers become good writers. Identify good writing features when reading.

Useful links:

Bug Club

Education City

BBC

BBC Skillswise