English Writing
How we Teach Writing at Redmarley
Intent
At Redmarley Primary Academy, our intent for Writing is to give children a purpose to write, through a thematic approach that engages and excites children on a topic e.g. Romans or Arctic Explorers. It provides a hook to learning, sparking children’s interest as writers, giving them a sense of purpose and audience and enabling them to write from a point of acquired knowledge e.g. biographies from Ernest Shackleton or diary extracts from a Roman soldier. This supports a richness and depth of writing, with more of an investment seen by learners, who motivated and enabled to 'Shine as a Light in the World'. It is important to note, that teachers will divert at times from what is planned if an opportunity arises linked to an event of cultural significance or of current value e.g. children wrote as persuasive writers, presenting and performing speeches to be considered for the role of school House Captain. Our Curriculum is planned to ensure that we teach the breadth of the National Curriculum for Writing.
Our core drivers for Writing are:
- To teach children to be fluent writers, in terms of spelling, grammar, punctuation and handwriting, recognising that these skills are essential in order to be able to communicate clearly
- To inspire and enable children to write, giving them the skills to communicate for a variety of purposes and audiences
- For children to love reading and be immersed in quality texts, so that they can learn from these, writing for pleasure, and communicating with clarity and accuracy.
To us Communication is at the heart of writing. In order to be a good writer and be able to communicate through this medium you need to:
- Have good verbal (using expression, intonation and a strong vocabulary) and non-verbal (using gesture and facial expression) communication skills.
- Be able to spell accurately, so that you can communicate clearly- you can be understood!
- Be able to vary sentences to ensure your writing makes sense and is interesting, using different grammar and punctuation rules and conventions in order to achieve this.
- Be able to write clearly and legibly, so that a reader can ‘read’ what you are trying to communicate.
To enable our children to connect with the purpose for writing as a means to communication we plan our writing around core texts (most often linked to theme). This provides a clear purpose for writing through oracy opportunities, learning outcomes, a published piece, as well as the grammar and punctuation rules and conventions being taught. This is all explicitly planned in our Writing Text Progression.
Implementation
Communication:
We prioritise this through our focus on quality adult-child interactions in early years and throughout Ks1 through our Continuous provision approach. Adults skilfully support and scaffold communication, building on vocabulary through strong discussion and deliberate enhancements. Across school we provide intentional opportunities for oracy e.g. through Collective Worship, as part of PQ Oracy Competition and throughout the school curriculum (children have a clear voice on topics, debating and discussing at a class level).
Spelling:
In Early Years and Ks1, children are taught spelling as part of Little Wandle Phonics. Year 1 and 2 continue with this phonics scheme, transitioning to spelling once phonics completion is achieved. There’s a bridge to spelling program within Little Wandle, which continues into the first term of Year 3 to ease the transition from KS1 to KS2.
In Ks2, Spelling is taught once a week as a discreet session and children then have the opportunity to practice and apply. Lower KS2 (Years 3 and 4) use worksheets to practice spelling, often revisiting KS1 coverage as well as teaching the new spelling rules within the curriculum. Upper KS2 (Years 5 and 6) have personalised spelling worksheets and assigned tasks, to accommodate individual learning needs, ensuring that spelling practice is targeted and impactful. We use Doodle Learning Platform to assign words being taught in class, giving children opportunity to apply.
Spelling Assessment:
Spelling is assessed through teacher judgment based on students' independent writing. There’s no formal testing, but spellings are evaluated as part of written tasks.
This approach blends phonics, teacher judgment, and personalised tasks to help students improve their spelling. The transition between phonics and spelling, especially with the Little Wandle scheme, ensures continuity and support as students move from one stage to the next.
Grammar and Punctuation:
Grammar rules are taught explicitly through our text based curriculum, whereby teachers use our writing progression to enable children to learn the correct conventions matched to the text they are immersed in e.g. if the quality text is ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ by Julia Donaldson in Y1, then you would be learning to add in appropriate adjectives to make your character description sentences more interesting to the reader. The grammar progression for each national curriculum year is shared below.
Handwriting: We teach children to form the letters accurately to write words in a non cursive script from Reception through to the end of year 1. We then introduce cursive script from Y3 upwards. All children are taught using the Handwriting Approach, however we recognise that some children have significant barriers in fine motor development. With this in mind we support the communication element of writing using technology and word processing software.
A Typical Writing lesson at Redmarley…
- A Journey of Writing, with a clear end point and purpose for children. We capture this process in one book to show that we value to whole process to a finished ‘published piece’.
- Speaking and listening, oral rehearsal, discussion and development of ideas and thinking. This will involve a process between adults and children. A process of creating, innovating and improving, playing with language together.
- Composition being firstly oral (as above) and then developed upon through writing and the drafting and editing process. You will see shared and explicitly modelled writing by the adults as part of this process. The writing process will be broken down into small steps to support children to learn new material. For younger learners and learners with SEND this process will be more supported and scaffolded, perhaps involving sentence stems, writing frames, pictures and word banks.
- Grammar being explicitly taught and/or being practiced and applied.
- A strong focus on vocabulary, with teachers explicitly teaching and exposing children to new words and children using these. Children will also be adventurous and bold with their vocabulary use (drawing on their learning from across the curriculum and reading experiences). Older children know that they can ‘correct’ spelling later as part of the editing process and younger children use phonics as their prime approach to spell ambitious vocabulary. The use of word banks and widget adaptations supports children’s exposure to new vocabulary and ensures our SEND learners are able to communicate well in writing.
- High expectations on spelling. We want to see spelling words applied and unknown spellings to be work hard on as a problem solving process. With younger children this will involve a phonetic approach and with older children the process will still use phonics, with the addition of knowledge of spelling pattern and aids such as dictionaries and online aids.
- High expectations for presentation and handwriting. We take pride in our work!
- Adults live marking throughout the session, providing quality feedback and adaptations to learning to ensure stretch for our greater depth writers and pull for children needing scaffolding to support their writing.
- Live marking and feedback throughout the session allows teachers to assess and identify gaps or misconceptions in writing e.g. full stops or commas being used inaccurately or a language device being used ineffectively e.g. similes in instruction writing.
Impact
In order for our Writing Curriculum to have had an impact, we will see children who are:
- Able to write for a variety of different purposes and audiences
- Part of an inspired, motivated and engage community of writers
- Able to spell accurately and where there are specific barriers to spelling are able to use other mediums to support communication in writing, so that spelling is not a barrier to writing
- Able to vary sentences with knowledge, skill and purpose in appropriate contexts to interest and engage the reader
- Have a legible handwriting style which enables them to communicate on paper and where handwriting is a barrier to writing then good word processing skills to enable effective communication in writing to occur.
We are currently building our Writing Curriculum to ensure that we have consistency of approach over a 2 year rolling programme for mixed age classes for KS1 and Ks2. Here is a snapshot so far, showing build for year A.
Class 2 Writing Text Long Term Plan
Class 3 Writing Text Long Term Plan
Class 4 Writing Text Long Term Plan
Writing Progression Document -this shows the expectations per year group for spelling, handwriting, vocabulary, punctuation and grammar and composition.
