Writing

How do we teach Writing?

Intent

At Bromham Primary, we understand the importance of high-quality English teaching, which will provide our pupils with the solid foundation to speak and write fluently and confidently by the end of Key Stage 2.

During writing lessons, we aim to develop the skills needed for writing across the curriculum and for future excellence, creating life-long learners and communicators. Throughout a pupil’s time at the school, a range of genres and high-quality texts are promoted and explored to inspire writing and reading for pleasure. We are dedicated to encouraging all children to become passionate and confident writers and to seize opportunities with assurance, always aiming high and taking pride in their work. Children have the opportunity to learn from each other through collaborative learning, giving them time to communicate ideas and emotions and delve into their imaginations together.

In English (Writing) every pupil will leave with:

Key Skills

The spoken and written language skills needed to be a successful communicator within our world – both speaking and writing to their audience, crafting their language accordingly to have the intended impact.
A wealth of rich and varied vocabulary to confidently communicate both in spoken language and in written work.
Curiosity in exploring new vocabulary and taking the opportunity to include this within written work, both in English and across the wider curriculum.
Proficiency and curiosity in reading to acquire the knowledge and tools used by an author to inspire their imagination and allow their creativity to flourish.
The transcription skills required to create grammatically correct sentences, allowing them to effectively communicate with their reader.
The knowledge about how to compose both fiction and non-fiction text types, understanding how to adapt structure, language and grammar to suit the purpose and audience.
The composition skills to successfully build character, setting, action, suspense and description throughout a piece of writing.

Qualities

Our children are confident communicators, both in spoken and written language, being ambitious with the language and grammatical skills they use, to have impact on their listener or reader.
They are curious when discovering new vocabulary and skills and aspire to make use of these accurately; they understand the importance of reading and the influence this can have on their own writing development.
A Bromham Primary child approaches literacy learning with enthusiasm and understands the benefits of collaborative learning to inspire their imaginations and creativity.
Our pupils make connections between new and prior learning and are excited to demonstrate this within their spoken language and written work.

Implementation

Our school provides daily English lessons through ‘Talk for Writing’, which allows the progression of skills across all year groups.

An LTP and MTP has been created by our Talk for Writing consultant, with a vision in mind for skills progression across the year groups. The units have been mapped to cover a range of genres and writing purposes. Writing toolkits are used for fiction writing; the skills within these toolkits are progressive and built upon as the years progress.

To ensure grammar progression, we use the supporting Grammar Progression document provided by for Talk for Writing. Teachers will highlight the grammar taught across the year to ensure coverage and direct opportunities for retrieval throughout the year; with these elements in their writing, children will meet age-related expectations.

The Talk for Writing process follows 3 stages: imitation, innovation and independent application. Each unit has a key focus and a writerly toolkit linked to this focus. The imitation stage gives children the opportunity to delve into a high-quality text (with age-appropriate grammar and punctuation), discuss what they have comprehended and explore the writerly skills used to create this piece of writing. Sentence patterns are selected from the model text, with key grammar foci, and these are selected by the teacher after the needs of the class are identified during their cold task assessment.
The innovation stage is the opportunity for children to apply the skills learnt during collaborative work with their peers and teachers. The teacher will complete a shared write, with class input, and model how to be successful in writing. The pupils then have the opportunity to write their own part of their innovation, with regular feedback from their teacher in the form of live feedback and ‘deep’ marking to ensure they are applying the skills and age-related grammar and punctuation necessary to be successful in that piece of writing.
The independent application stage is where children are provided with a new stimulus and given the opportunity to apply all they have learnt within a unit.
Scaffolding and modelling is used throughout a unit, with collaborative work being encouraged.

Early Years
Invention stories are used weekly to develop story language (Once upon a time, One day/Early one morning, Unfortunately, Luckily, Finally). Teachers provide the children with a stimulus and together they invent a story about the given character. The story created is told verbally, with the teacher mapping this as the story as is formed. Actions are used alongside the text map to encourage the oral retelling of the invention story.

EYFS also follow Talk for Writing, which leads to purposeful talk in the classroom and the development of language and communication through real-life experiences, leading to opportunities for mark-making (in the early stages of the year) and writing (by the end of the academic year). A unit will begin with a model text for the children to internalise; the internalising will happen over a number of lessons, with concrete resources and story maps being used to support internalisation. During the unit, the children will explore new vocabulary and questions about the text, with teachers encouraging curiosity through further exploratory learning.

A Talk for Writing lesson in EYs is between 20 and 30 minutes in length and, on the most-part, is delivered as a whole-class input. Follow-up activities (through continuous provision) may include adult-led sequencing, writing key words, ordering animals or characters as they appear within the model text or making something linked to the story.

KS1 and KS2
In English lessons across both key stages, we follow a sequence of lessons which give children the chance to explore quality texts and pieces of writing, explore the structure of different genres and text types, and the writerly tools used to construct such texts. Grammar is taught during this sequence of lessons and children are provided with opportunities to recognise this in context and apply it for themselves in writing through shared and independent writing sessions. Throughout this process, teachers model these skills and work collaboratively with pupils to create shared pieces of writing. These pieces of shared writing are displayed on washing lines and working walls to support independent application and show the value placed on writing.

Rationale for organisation:
The long-term plan has been mapped in this way to allow exposure to different genres and text types.
Story plot structures are weaved in to the plan to allow revisiting of common structures and the development of particular skills before application to other structures.
Certain plot structures are included more than once in a year group so that children can begin to identify patterns within these plots, meaning this plot structure comes naturally to them and their focus can be on the writerly tools needed to construct the story.

What have you done to ensure every skill is covered?

We have a long-term plan from EYFS to Y6 which maps the genres and text types to ensure coverage of different text types. We have medium-term plans for each unit on the LTP and these ensure the composition skills are covered. Teachers use the toolkits to plan to the needs of the class and also select sentence patterns to exemplify key grammar skills to be taught. Teachers will highlight the Grammar Progression document to ensure full coverage within their year group.

The long-term vision or plan for writerly skills coverage is to have toolkits for each year group and these will be highlighted for each child during writing assessments and then passed on to the next teacher.

Impact:

At Bromham Primary, we want children to be passionate about writing and be proud of the writing they produce, knowing that it is valued. We aim to create confident writers, who seize opportunities with assurance and creativity.

Assessment for learning strategies are used on a daily basis in classrooms and inform future planning of lessons and focus groups.

We measure the impact of our curriculum using the following methods:

Short-burst writing and shared writing sessions allow teachers to identify children who require further scaffolding and this is planned and implemented before the final, independent application in a unit of work.

Formal assessments for writing are completed using Focus Education documents at the end of each Talk for Writing unit. Children complete their ‘Independent Application’ (hot task) and this is assessed against our writing criteria. These assessed pieces will include both fiction and non-fiction, meaning children are writing for a range of purposes and for different audiences.

Pupil book studies are used, where children have the opportunity to discuss their learning and recall parts of a unit.

Learning walks of the environment and photographs of sequences of learning are taken. Feedback is then provided via professional dialogue between teachers to understand their class’s work and how supportive the learning environment is to their learning.

Partnerships with parents

Parents are informed of writing units being covered through a termly topic grid. During Parents' Evenings, targets for writing are shared with parents and a written report is completed annually in the Summer Term. Children are provided with some English-related homework each week. Year 6 make use of SATs Companion which provides SATs style questions for English.

Writing

Writing

How do we teach Writing?

Roadmap EYFS and Key Stage 1

Road Map Key Stage 2

Grammar Progression

Long Term Overview Years 1-6