Writing
Intent
At Orchard Primary Academy, we strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. We maintain through each key stage and year group that we want our children to develop their vocabulary understanding, write in a range of different genres and continuously develop their spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. As well as this, we want our children to understand the spoken word, use expression and participate as a member of society by speaking fluently and articulately.
Implementation
To enable our children to write effectively and coherently we teach Writing using 'The Write Stuff' approach by Jane Considine. This approach is used from Nursery to Year 6 and allows children to apply basic skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge to write effective sentences, which are full of impact and keep the reader interested. 'The Write Stuff' brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced though the 'Writing Rainbow', using the three zones of writing:
From 'The Writing Rainbow', symbols are used to support children within their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.
As part of the teaching sequence, teachers plan experience days; sentence stacking lessons and independent writing sequences. Experience days immerse children in experiences linked to their writing and drench them in vocabulary linked to the lenses in 'The Writing Rainbow'. From the experience days, children take part in the sentence stacking lessons. Sentence stacking lessons include effective demonstration writing from the teacher and the writing of three high-quality sentences with focuses on lenses of the rainbow. Children are also given the opportunity to 'Deepen The Moment' and add more to their writing using a lense of their choice. Independent writing sequences give children the opportunity to showcase everything they've learnt in their experience days and sentence stacking lessons.
Over their time at Orchard, children will write a range of genres focused on high-quality texts. The chosen texts and genres cover a wide range of themes, including cultural, social and physical diversity. All fiction texts are explored through a central character, where the children put themselves in their position and focus on the highs and lows of story events and discuss the range of emotions from plot point to plot point.
To find out more about our approach to teaching writing, please click on the link below:
Orchard Primary Academy - English Policy
Key Documents For Implementation
To support our planning and to ensure that our children develop and progress through basic skills, grammar and punctuation we have created a 'Writing Progression' document. This document progresses from EYFS to Year 6 and supports fiction and non-fiction writing elements.
All year groups have a yearly overview, which include both Fiction and Non-Fiction texts for Writing. The texts chosen have been carefully considered to ensure children have access to a rich and diverse reading diet. The yearly overviews ensure that children encounter a wide range of text types throughout their school career and have the opportunity to build on prior learning within their current year group and year on year.
Follow the links to look at each year group's yearly overview:
Impact
Children will progress through and eventually leave Orchard Primary Academy been able to;
- write for a range of purposes including diary entries, persuasion, story to name a few.
- use their vast knowledge vocabulary to excite, inform or entertain the reader.
- understand a range of punctuation and the effect it can have on the reader in both writing and reading.
- understand the various sentence types that can be used to support different genres.
- Spelling using their phonetic knowledge and spelling rules put in place.
- to speak clearly, fluently and coherently, to be able to listen attentively with understanding, pleasure and empathy and contribute to group discussions effectively.
Support Learning at Home
Writing for a real-life purpose can be a great way of practising writing. Writing cards, shopping lists, or letters and emails to relatives can all be motivating real life reasons for writing. Children might also keep a diary or be encouraged to write short stories based on books they have read or toys they enjoy playing with.
For more information on how to support your child at home, Oxford Owl offers some helpful tips for parents and useful activities for children. Click here for more information.
Other useful websites include;
Spelling
Children in Year 2 to Year 6, learn to spell using Jane Considine’s ‘The Spelling Book’. Jane Considine’s approach to teaching spelling focuses on children becoming ‘Spelling Detectives’ and to be interested in language; the history and the meaning of even the smallest unit of sounds. The approach is underpinned by three key principles:
- Build a positive spelling culture, where children will read with ‘switched on’ brains
- Finding and identifying phonemes and syllables within words
- Seeking patterns in sounds, letters and shapes
Following the same approach as our Writing, The Write Stuff, children learn spelling strategies through ‘The Spelling Rainbow’. Teachers teach children specific strategies through lenses, such as: organising sounds.
Spelling is explicitly taught two to three times a week through: Investigations, Spell It Out sessions and Fast Tasks. Investigations test hypotheses focussed on spelling conventions. Children are given opportunities to work in different ways, using a variety of resources to prove/disprove the hypotheses within a range of words. Spell It Out sessions explore phonemes and syllables in words and patterns within words/groups of words. Over a two-week period, children look for patterns and focussed phonemes across the curriculum. Fast Tasks revisit prior learning from previous year groups and the child’s current year. Tasks take a variety of forms with children working individually; in pairs and as a class.
Learning from spelling sessions are consolidated and practised across all subjects, particularly in Reading and Writing.