Writing
Writing Curriculum Intent
At Chiseldon our approach is to have consistency and progression from Nursery through to Year Six to provide all children with a high-quality education in English. Writing is a fundamental part of this, with many opportunities provided across the curriculum to improve and apply these skills so that children develop a clear understanding of the writing process and how effective writing impacts its reader. Spelling is a continued focus, with the addition of key vocabulary being introduced and embedded within the currciulum. Children need to learn spelling rules, patterns and the need for care in spellings to allow others to understand. Here at Chiseldon we are very proud of our pupils handwriting and take particular care in our cursive/joined-up handwriting style. We use letterjoin as the basis for our handwriting policy (please see the Handwriting tab for more details).
Writing Curriculum Implementation
Motivating children to write using 'The Write Stuff'by Jane Considine, allows pupils to have clear assigned goals which allow their confidence to grow. "The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
"The Write Stuff" uses three essential components to support children in becoming great writers
The three zones of writing :-
- IDEAS - The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.
- TOOLS - The GRAMMARISTICS. The grammar rules of our language system and an accessible way to target weaknesses in pupils grammatical and linguistic structures.
- TECHNIQUES - The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.
Spellings are taught as an independent lesson either as Sounds Write, our dedicated phonics programme, which is taught daily in KS1 or as a spelling rule/pattern lesson every Friday in KS2. These spellings are also sent home to ensure children have the opportunity to practise before the following week's spelling test. As well as this, children are expected to learn the National Curriculum statutory spellings throughout the year and to celebrate this learning we have a Spelling Bee at the end of every long term.
Children are given the opportunity to use these different skills every other week with an independent 'Mystery Box' stimulus which they then edit and improve this gives them the opportunity to evaluate the effectivness of their writing.
Writing Curriculum Impact
Children at Chiseldon will have a concept of how to build, plan and complete a piece of writing. They will have a clear view of what high quality writing looks like and can improve it based on editing and then feedback. We aim to ensure children are confident and writing as readers.