WHY WE TEACH WRITING
We believe that writing is a fundamental life skill and we inspire children to become creative and confident communicators, readers and writers, leading to improved opportunities. Through our English curriculum, children at Ravenscroft experience a wide range of purposeful texts, which enriches and broadens their vocabulary and grammatical technique through writing. Through meaningful teaching and learning experiences and through writing for a purpose, children are encouraged to value their own work.
At Ravenscroft, we believe that all pupils should be able to confidently communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions through their writing. We aim to develop our children’s ability to become confident, independent and creative writers who see themselves as authors and poets; giving meaning and purpose to the words they write.
By developing our children’s ability to write, we aim to give them a voice, support them to communicate and provide them with a skill that is vital for all of their schooling and to their life beyond.
HOW WE TEACH WRITING
Our writing curriculum is carefully constructed to allow children to become competent in spelling and handwriting and composition, articulating ideas and structuring them into speech and writing.
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 an 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 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 children analyse sentence structure, vocabulary choices and effective use of punctuation and are encouraged to apply these when structuring their own writing.
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 leave an ‘editing line’ so that improvements and additions can be clearly marked in the text.
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.
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.
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
- 1:1 sessions to support pupils with personalised targets
WHAT YOUR CHILD WILL LEARN
- Write accurately and coherently, in the appropriate form, for a range of contexts, audiences and purposes.
- Write at length through the development of writing stamina.
- Write with accurate spelling and punctuation.
- Use a variety of grammar correctly.
- Develop imagination and creativity.
