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.
In addition to our English teaching sequence, we also concentrate the first 15 minutes on English Fundamental skills to enable children to learn and comprehend the written and spoken form of the English language as well as teaching functional skills to polish their reading, writing and listening skills. The 15 minute slot will include teaching aspects of handwriting and letter formation, high frequency spelling, basic punctuation and follow a scheme from Grammarsaurus based on the Place Value of Punctuation and Grammar.
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.
Punctuation & Grammar Progression
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:
Reception & Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
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 Read, Write, Inc. Spelling. The Read, Write, Inc. spelling scheme is a continuation of the phonics that children learn in Year 1. Spelling is taught with deliberate, focused practice as constant revision and practice are key to children’s success. Children have a weekly rule to focus on, and practise these in different contexts to help them use and apply these automatically. This allows them to focus on what matters most – learning to spell.
This approach to teaching spelling uses ‘Humaliens’ to introduce spelling rules in an exciting way. This encourages children to form a positive relationship with spelling, and seek patterns within words.
The spelling programme’s core activities are:
- alternative spellings of vowels
- alternative spellings of consonants
- homophones
- the impact of adding prefixes and suffixes to root words
- spelling plural nouns
- ‘silent’ letters
- unusual letter strings
- word families
Spelling is explicitly taught 5 times a week for 15 minutes through: The Spelling Zone, Dots and Dashes, Word Changers, Dictation, Four in a Row and Team Teach. The Spelling Zone looks at the rule they are learning that week, and allows them to apply a wide range of words in sentences. Dots and Dashes uses children’s phonics knowledge to break down sounds within words. Word changers focusses on the use of prefixes, suffixes and root words applied correctly. Dictation is a full comprehensive session which allows children to work in pairs and practise their reading for a partner to write and spell. Every Thursday, children are able to practise in the form of the game Four In a Row, they work in pairs to spell the weeks words within a fun environment. Children also have time to become a teacher, every Friday, they work in teams to discuss word difficulty and one team leader asks their group to spell words from the week.
Children also have the opportunity 4 days a week, to practise Red and Orange words, these are words which are commonly misspelt by adults and the children learn strategies to help them with these such as:
- Word in a word
- Mnemonics
- Say it as it looks
- Rap it
- Sticky letters
Learning from spelling sessions are consolidated and practised across all subjects, particularly in Reading and Writing.
I have learnt... that I can find a word in a word to help me remember how to spell. Example 't-hey' - Year 4
I have learnt... doubling letters in words and adding 'y'. - Year 2
I have learnt... that if you add 'er' or 'est' at the end of some words, you double the consonant. - Year 6