English Writing

Teaching and Learning of Writing Skills at St Mark’s Primary School

Our Intent

At St Mark’s we intend for our pupils to be secure in all of the requirements of the National Curriculum and have the experience and opportunity to write for a range of different audiences and purposes. We endeavor to do this through the use of high-quality texts, which act as our inspiration and motivation for writing.  Whilst there is a focus on spelling, handwriting and grammar, our intention within writing lessons is to contextualise these important skills and embed them within text level outcomes rather than isolated word and sentence level tasks and activities. This approach to teaching English is embedded within the Literacy Tree Program of Study. Children are exposed to a range of literary fiction , non-fiction and poetry across a range of different themes, with the intention of developing increased and eventually full security in the core concepts below:

 Implementation 

• The full coverage of our writing curriculum is contained within our English Overview. This identifies the different texts that children will use in their daily writing lessons as well as the different genres and writing opportunities that those texts lend themselves to
• St Mark’s Primary School uses the Literacy Tree book-based writing platform for teaching, learning and delivery of writing. It provides detailed planning sequences which are embedded within a taught text and lead to purposeful short and long writing opportunities. This approach also provides resources which contributed to developing language, thoughts and planning ideas
• We use a range of texts which are based on a wide variety of high quality and significant children's literature chosen to engage, challenge and support children to be critical readers and confident and informed writers. Some texts are new, whilst others would be described as classic literature. Where possible, we intentionally link our choice of text to the curriculum themes to further immerse children in the subject area of their termly topic and inspire their writing.
• All classes are set differentiated spellings on a weekly basis
• During Quality First Teaching we model, challenge, engage and support children in becoming independent writers.

• Within lessons we build in opportunities for pupils to develop language, plan ideas, collect vocabulary, apply spelling rules and explore themes, as well as complete a range of text types.
• Planned lessons include key questions and language; quality first teaching (teacher input and opportunities for children to interact), success criteria; differentiated learning tasks/ activities, specific guided group work; guidance for support staff ...
• Plenaries and mini plenaries are used to reflect on learning, extend learning and sometimes reshape tasks in order to challenge and support learners more effectively.
• Marking codes are used at the front of each book to promote independence.
• Opportunities for children to complete an independent piece of writing is provided every week where appropriate.
• Misspelt words are highlighted using the key stage marking codes and children are encouraged to go back and amend.
• Positive, forward looking, next steps feedback is given to pupils to help them to improve their work, develop their independence and engage in the editing process
• Handwriting is taught on a regular, daily cycle for all children in the Early Years and Key Stage One classes, as part of phonics group work as well as discretely in class.
• The Key Stage Two classes will have a short, regular (2-3 times per week) taught/modelled handwriting sessions from their class teacher to develop the teaching of handwriting skills.

Impact 

• Writing is assessed against the Year group writing objectives within the English curriculum and our assessment tool Target Tracker on a termly basis
• Children are expected to make six steps of progress across the year and are plotted using the key in the Target Tracker (see below)
• Children regularly assess themselves against the success criteria within writing lessons and are engaged in the formative assessment process of responding to teacher feedback and comments in order to improve their work
• Exemplars of work from a range of schools which is deemed to be at the expected standards and at greater depth, is used to assess the standard of work within different year groups
• Teachers participate in whole school and cross school moderation to check, compare and improve standards across year groups

Target Tracker Summary  

Terminology

Accompanying documents

English Writing Positional statement

English Overview