Mayfield Primary SchoolWriting: Vision & Overview
WRITING: VISION & OVERVIEW
Mrs Duerden
'ALWAYS START WITH WHY'
Writing At Mayfield
At Mayfield, we aim to develop writers who understand how to create and craft pieces of work in differing ways. From their first steps in our Early Years to the end of Key Stage 2, children learn to write effectively for a range of audiences and purposes. We ensure every child leaves us with a strong sense of the way in which they can express themselves and their message in writing. Throughout any writing process, we place great emphasis upon the children’s oracy - a process we call ‘Let’s Talk’. Being able to rehearse, prepare, re-tell and familiarise verbally is so important and a key to our children being able to write effectively. In each unit of writing, carefully planned and structured talk lays the foundation for writing tasks. Amongst other strategies, we draw on a Talk for Writing approach to develop children’s narrative writing. Through discussion of ideas and the rehearsal of key sentence structures and vocabulary in context, Let’s Talk is a key part of each writing project from EYFS to Year 6. Our writing curriculum ensures that children develop both their transcription (spelling and handwriting - with reasonable and sensible emphasis upon the handwriting element) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing). Across our writing curriculum, a range of purposes for writing are prioritised, sequenced and revisited many times so that children make progress in different styles of writing (for example narrative writing, informative writing and persuasive writing) but can also consolidate learning in order to become confident writers. Writing projects span between three to four weeks focusing on a particular purpose of writing, with a published outcome achieved in each of these aimed at a specific audience. This structure ensures children have time to familiarise, practice, rehearse, refine and embed their writing based on feedback and responsive teaching. We take time to build projects with heavy emphasis upon the spoken word in the earlier phases. Repeating, revisiting and consolidating are key and our philosophy in terms of project length and the long term overview planning have these three aspects at the heart of our thinking for our children as emergent writers. Our writing cycle ensures children are taught how to generate ideas, plan, draft, edit and improve their writing. The extract below is taken from our English Core Skills Document. Our writer’s follow a ‘reading into writing’ thread. We call this our ‘Writer’s Craft Process’.
Immerse in good quality reading/WAGOLLs.
Immerse in, and gather/magpie, the effective language for the project.
Become familiar with examples of the text type/purpose. Map these onto planners/structures.
Unpick the necessary writer’s craft skills to achieve the intended purpose on your audience.
Practice new/essential/dominant writer’s craft grammar and punctuation explicitly. A heavy emphasis is upon sentence structure/control.
Make plans for the final outcome.
Chunk your first draft.
Refine and Polish in detail.
Create further improved drafts – where necessary, repeating Refine & Polish.
Final version is published for writing portfolios.
Writer’s Craft is a key phrase that we use. It relates to the point of writing and puts our children in the position of the writer and the choices they make to achieve an intended effect/purpose and consider the intended audience at all times. Our text types, support structures and further details on this entire process can be found in our English Core Skills Document.
Key Threads For Our Writing Curriculum
* A purpose for writing.
* An audience for the writing. Your audience is not always ‘children of the same age as the writer’.
* A clear outcome and context established at the outset.
* If ‘WAGOLLS’ are used, they must be made bespoke. Only the class teacher can know what they are looking for in the planned outcome and your ‘WAGOLL’ must reflect this.
* A bespoke set of supporting resources is specific to our school and children. Generic, pre-produced resources will not highlight our methods or terminology but may be used to assist with preparation, ideas and time management. You will need to personalise such resources to meet the needs of your children.
A sequence of learning – 4 stages.
1) Get To Know 2) Practice 3) Over To You 4) Re-cap & Polish
Reading/Talk – Reading/Talk into Writing - Writing
Shared Reading – Modelled Writing – Shared Writing
You may want to use guided writing or 1-2-1 mark as a strategy during independent phases.
There are specific ways in which we construct learning dependent upon the phase we are working upon, as we looking for differing responses dependent upon where a learner’s confidence and understanding may be in relation to the stage of the project.
Handwriting Approach
Whilst we practice handwriting (which the major emphasis upon our emergent and youngest readers and writers in school), we don't make this our main goal in writing development. Let's be clear. Handwriting is not the world our learners will move into. Almost everywhere, the written form of communication is electronic. Handwriting now generally has a very limited audience and purpose. It is either a note/s for yourself as the audience, or a note/s for a known small group or individuals (often in the workplace). So we place handwriting in that context. Its is not 1925. We are a century on and enter a world that has evolved in terms of communication in hugely accelerated ways in the last ten years alone. What we have to ensure is that we are not enforcing a barrier to learning that is not a barrier once a learner enters the wider world. Handwriting is not easy for minority of our learners and therefore we build logically and sensibly in this known context for them.
In the Early Years, our children begin this journey by mark making and drawing patterns, which develops their fine motor skills. This develops through our EYFS with ensuring correct pencil grip by the children when they begin to make letters and string letters together to make words. As soon as they can form letters securely with the correct orientation, usually within Year 1, we begin teaching continuous cursive script where reasonable for the individual learner. We continue to teach handwriting as the children progress from Key Stage 1 to 2 with the aim of increasing the fluency with which children are able to write down what they want to say.
So we use common sense and look to the greatest gains for a learner's journey. Confidence. Belief. Willingness. Imparting knowledge in less constricted ways - above doing so in a previously received way that would have made sense to employers and the wider world before the communication revolution.
What is vital and what we push - and this is a never ending piece of work - is the ability to communicate learning and understanding clearly to whoever hears, watches or reads it.
Is this a handwriting policy? Yes. We think so. Does it break from an established view? Yes. But for the rationale given above. We are not here to build barriers, we are hear to shape a learner that is resilient and more confident in their future learning for a world they will grow in to. Shoe horning into a suit that does not fit many is not our aim.
Grammar, Punctuation & Spelling
The teaching of grammar and punctuation is embedded within our English projects and taught from the angle of Writer’s Craft so that children learn these skills and use them in context at the point of writing. Explicit teaching of grammar and punctuation in meaningful contexts is a core component of our writing cycle and they feature within all stage of our writing cycle/process but are specifically focused upon in our practice phase.
Our curriculum is carefully sequenced to ensure that children build a secure understanding of grammatical features and learn to apply them effectively in a range of contexts. We deliberately plan for vast amounts of revisiting, consolidation and application in a range of different genres, contexts and purposes. Confidence comes from using skills and knowledge which becomes so familiar that they can deploy it successfully. This is of underlying importance in our strategy around the teaching of grammar and punctuation. The English Core Skills Document contains full details of our grammar and punctuation coverage. We have determined that some specific terminology relating to grammatical understanding are best taught and introduced in Year 6 only. You can find these terms within our core skills document.
In order for children to achieve a high standard of spelling they need to be explicitly taught the knowledge and skills needed. Weekly spelling lessons takes place from Y1 – 6 following the spelling rules and expectations set out in the National Curriculum for English. In the Early Years, spelling is taught alongside the specific phonics curriculum. Children initially master spelling their names before moving on to applying the sounds they have learnt in their own independent writing e.g. map, cat, etc... Emphasis is always placed on children ‘having a go’ at applying the sounds that they have learnt rather than achieving the correct spelling from the outset.
How We Assess Progress In Writing
The impact of our writing curriculum can be seen in the children’s work and responses to learning via: books and other responses.
Children’s learning is assessed informally in each lesson and teachers plan responsively for next steps. At the end of a project teacher’s assess the final outcomes produced by the children and this helps to provide evidence for broader summative progress and attainment judgements made using the Key Milestones Assessment Document.
Summative judgements are submitted formally twice a year, using the evidence gathered, stating whether each child is working at the expected standard, towards the expected standard, at greater depth within the expected standard or at a pre-key stage standard.
We use Writing Stations to support learners as they progress through projects. The most frequently used strategy is our Brain Gym opportunities which are devised as a planned and regular opportunity for daily review.
How We Record Outcomes In Writing
Our children offer a huge range of daily starting points and school readiness, therefore we have carefully considered ways of demonstrating progress and outcomes and how these must be adaptable to suit the needs of learners and the requirements of the subject. Therefore each subject has its own bespoke way of gathering evidence from learners that are not simply restricted to traditional pupil exercise books - otherwise recording work becomes a barrier to learning rather than a chance to celebrate children’s achievements and specialist skills and knowledge in areas where they may otherwise excel.
