Writing

Intent

At Idle C of E we aim to ignite a love of expressing and communicating ideas through an engaging, immersive writing curriculum drawn from quality texts. We strive to provide meaningful writing opportunities for a range of audiences and purposes, provide the tools to become confident and independent writers, and develop a lifelong love of writing. We endeavour to motivate creative thinking and writing processes, giving children the courage to develop their own style and voice. By providing aspirational models of spoken language and quality, diverse texts, we foster the art of speaking and listening, which in turn feeds into children’s understanding of written language. Regular reflection is a key element in the writing journey and opportunities for drafting, editing and reviewing are central to this process. Robust spelling and handwriting instruction supports children’s autonomy and allows for fluent composition.

Implementation

We believe in a three-part writing journey with a clear writing outcome and purpose, which is shared with the children and regularly referred to. The first part of our journey is the immersion phase, where children are immersed in the genre, character and plot of the stimulus, creating enthusiasm and excitement for the writing to come. This stimulus may stem from a quality text; a cross curricular theme linked to history or geography; a trip or visit or a film clip. The second part of our journey is the toolkit phase, where children are provided with a ‘toolkit’ of skills to enable them to create a successful, engaging piece of writing. These toolkits incorporate aspirational vocabulary, new and revised grammar skills pertinent to the genre of the writing and a piece of writing by the class teacher to model a good example in the genre for the children to examine and refer to. The final part of our journey is our outcome, where children are able to apply their learning and new skills to a piece of independent writing. Revising and editing work play a key part in ensuring children have pride and ownership of their finished piece, and are given every opportunity to succeed in their task. Through regular spelling lessons and daily handwriting input, children’s transcription skills allow them the fluency and autonomy to focus on the composition of texts. Learning home spellings through our Spelling Bee also provides a huge scaffold in this process, clearing thinking space to focus on the composition of writing. In reception and year 1, the focus is on phonics and by working through our ELS scheme, the children amass a knowledge of units of sound that they can build together to make words to write and convey meaning to others. Our love of writing stems from our love of reading and to this end we have created a reading/writing spine to marry the two. Through the spine, we have ensured that each year group has a cohesive approach to writing covering all genres required of each year group. These are linked to quality texts which can be used as stimuli or companions to the writing. Through all phases of the writing journey we aim to support, enable and challenge our children to produce quality writing that they can be proud of, and aspire to develop a love of writing in all.

Impact

Through a robust understanding of planning, assessing and delivering high quality writing journeys, we endeavour for children to be equipped with the tools to confidently craft engaging written pieces. They will write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. They will have a rich vocabulary at their disposal with which to articulate their thoughts and opinions. They will experience the joy and power of writing for a purpose and sharing their work with others. Above all they will be infused with a love of writing that stays with them into secondary school and beyond

Pupils at Idle CE continue to exceed national average for age related expectations at the end of Key Stage 2.