Writing at Ravenscroft
At Ravenscroft, we have carefully designed writing opportunities planned into our Power of Reading text-based approach to develop our children’s ability to become confident, independent writers who see themselves as authors and poets. We provide exciting writing opportunities and experiences that engage and enhance our pupils.
We start every English lesson with a ‘Star Sentence’ that focuses on the application of grammar and punctuation and is used to embed our children’s understanding of grammatical structure and vocabulary. We also use a weekly ‘Star Paragraph’ in KS2 to provide an opportunity for our children to apply their skills to write an independent follow-on paragraph in the style of the author.
Through our use of fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts, we provide a scaffold for our children to use to become writers themselves. We use shared and guided writing in our sessions to demonstrate the writing process and the use of editing to make improvements in order to write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of purposes.
We use the Power of Reading scheme to teach writing and through this our children learn to recognise the features of different genres and to analyse the structure of a range of different texts. By using high quality texts in our English sessions, we encourage children to make links and become empathetic and ambitious writers. In order for our children to write for a variety of purposes and using different genres, we believe that grammar and punctuation should be taught alongside our children’s study of texts. Through our use of core texts our children analyse sentence structure, vocabulary choices and effective use of punctuation and are encouraged to apply these when structuring their own writing.
Alongside the core texts we teach spelling by exploring spelling patterns and rules.
Children are also taught to spell accurately and identify reasons for mis-spellings and to proof-read their own writing to correct errors. They learn how to recognise and use word origins, families and roots to build their skills and are taught how to use dictionaries and thesauruses to improve their work.
Our children are taught the correct letter formation from the very beginning of their time in school. They learn how to sit properly in order to have the correct posture for writing, hold a pencil in the correct position, and develop a fluent and legible cursive handwriting style as they progress through school. Class teachers and teaching assistants role model the school’s handwriting style when marking children’s work, writing on the whiteboard and on displays around the school.
At Ravenscroft, our children will acquire and learn the skills to plan, draft and refine their written work over time and are encouraged to develop independence in being able to identify their own areas for improvement in all pieces of writing. We encourage the use of a purple pen to edit and improve work and in longer pieces of writing children will miss out and ‘editing line’ so that improvements and additions can be clearly marked in the text.
In order that our children know how they to improve their work, all KS1 and KS2 children have a personal writing target which they use to self-assess their writing against.
Writing is also a key focus in the wider curriculum and children are given the opportunity to transfer and build upon their knowledge of writing studied during English lessons and to apply this learning to different subjects for different purposes.
Teachers use formative and summative assessment as part of the teaching and learning process. It is used to identify the next steps in children’s learning
Regular, detailed assessments enable teachers to quickly identify children who are not meeting age related expectations in English and need extra support.
We provide additional provision for children which may include:
Pre-teaching which may include a text, vocabulary, grammar or punctuation.
Small group support from a teacher or TA during lessons
Access to GPC charts to enable swift identification of necessary graphemes
Catch-up Reading
Daily 1:1 reading
Additional phonics support
1:1 sessions to support pupils with personalised targets
