Our Intent for Writing at Roundhill Primary School

At Roundhill, the intention of our writing curriculum is to create young writers who are confident, aware of, and able to use their own knowledge. We want children to enjoy writing and experience the breadth and variety of a range of different genres and text types. Writing empowers children to communicate their ideas and emotions to others, to be creative and imaginative, or meticulous with details – we aim to create writers who relish the process of writing and the challenges that it presents.

We want all children to be able to have a good understanding of English to be able to communicate confidently in both speech and writing. We use a progressive curriculum that builds upon previous teaching, with regular assessment to ensure each child can reach their full potential. We include and engage all of our children in high-quality learning experiences with the aim that they leave as confident, capable and independent writers, who not only understand the purpose and importance of writing but also enjoy the writing process.

Our aims are to:

• Plan a progressive curriculum that builds upon previous teaching, with regular assessments to ensure pupils’ individual progress within writing.
• Ensure every child has a good knowledge of phonics to springboard them to become fluent writers.
• Ensure objectives in reading and writing have purpose which are linked to high-quality texts.
• Develop spoken language through debate, drama and discussion, using the issues raised through, and within, text.
• Provide stimulating writing opportunities and experiences that engage and enhance all pupils.
• Teach children to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.
• Give all children a good understanding of grammar so they can apply it to their writing.
• Teach children a wide vocabulary and how to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they have learnt throughout their time in primary school.
• Develop children’s pride in presentation of their writing by developing a legible, joined individual handwriting style by the time they move to Key Stage 3.

Implementation

At Roundhill Primary School, we use Literacy Tree as our scheme of work for writing. By placing books at the core, we are allowing teachers to use the text as the context for the requirements of the national curriculum. The national curriculum states that:

‘‘This guidance is not intended to constrain or restrict teachers’ creativity, simply to provide the structure on which they can construct exciting lessons.’

This would suggest that a context for learning is vital – and this is where our chosen approach can support teachers with ensuring that objectives for reading and writing, including those for grammar can have purpose.

We will always aim for our writing opportunities to be meaningful and to feel authentic, whether these are short or long, and that the audience is clear. Books offer this opportunity.  Our aim would be that that children have real reasons to write, whether to explain, persuade, inform or instruct and that where possible, this can be embedded within text or linked to a curriculum area.

Writing in role, using a range of genres, is key to our approach and we always model the tone and level of formality. This sits comfortably alongside the following statement from the English national curriculum: ‘The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.’

In many cases objectives are covered more than once and children have opportunities to apply these several times over the course of a year, as well as to consolidate prior knowledge from previous years. This approach supports children to think deeply and develop skills more broadly. Where needed, planning sequences will be adapted, personalised and differentiated to ensure all access arrangements can be made to support children who may require this.

Within each unit of work within writing, children will:

• Have opportunities to participate in drama & spoken language activities.
• Explore the features of different types of texts and modelled examples.
• Practise and improve their handwriting.
• Use relevant strategies to widen their vocabulary including technical vocabulary.
• Experience shared and modelled writing.
• Be taught lessons in spelling, grammar and punctuation.
• Plan, draft, edit and enhance their writing.
• Write independently and present their writing for an audience.
• Perform or read their work to their peers or an audience.