Writing (Statement of Intent, Implementation & Impact)

Intent

Lawn Primary School believes that strong English skills are essential for progressing across the curriculum and preparing for adult life.  All teachers have a responsibility to develop children's competence in reading, writing, speaking and listening and to ensure that children build the language skills necessary to fully access the curriculum.

The school recognises the effect that a fluent, legible and coherent writing style can have on a child's progress, both inside and outside of the school environment.  At our school, we provide a broad and balanced literacy curriculum which encompasses focused writing practice, including handwriting, phonics, spelling, widening vocabulary, and writing for different styles, purposes and audiences.

Aims:

• To guide and nurture each individual on their own personal journeys to becoming successful writers.
• For Every child to have a good knowledge of phonics to springboard children to becoming fluent writers
• Provide exciting writing opportunities and experiences that engage and enhance all children.
• All children to acquire a wide vocabulary and to be able to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they learn throughout their time in primary school.
• All children to have a solid understanding of grammar and apply it effectively to their writing.
• To write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purpose and audiences.
• All children should be encouraged to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in part by developing a legible, cursive, individual handwriting style by the time they move to secondary school.
• To plan a progressive curriculum to build upon previous teaching, with regular assessment to ensure each child's needs are met to reach their full potential.

Implementation

At Lawn Primary School, we follow a whole school mastery approach to writing through the programme 'Pathways to Write'.  Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing.  Key skills are taught and repeated; there are multiple opportunities throughout each unit to use and apply the key skills until they can be mastered fully.  Within each sequence, there are many opportunities for incidental short-burst writing with an extended written outcome built up to by the end of each unit.

Alongside key writing skills, we also ensure extensive opportunities to develop and apply vocabulary.  Vocabulary boxes are incorporated in every unit which give guidance on tiers of the vocabulary that is developed within the unit.  This includes opportunities for application of the word list words for years 3 & 4 and 5 & 6 and common exception words for Year 1 and Year 2.  At Lawn, we aim to develop word depth with children by delivering a planned approach to explaining words and meaningful, repeated exposure to them.

Within each year group, a range of genres are covered to ensure the breadth required by the National Curriculum is achieved.  These are both non-fiction and fiction.  Not all genres are covered in every year group but writing outcomes have been carefully chosen to suit each specific year group.

Each unit of work is expected to last 4-6 weeks.  The teaching sequence of each unit comprises of 15 sessions, but each session may take longer than an actual lesson depending on the class.  Planning follows the sequence below:

Writing - Pathways to Write

To support the National Curriculum for English from Year 1 and the EYFS Development Matters, we follow a whole school mastery approach to writing through the programme Pathways to Write.  Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing.  Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the writing activities provided.  Many opportunities for widening children's vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Write approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.

An Overview of Pathways to Write

Pathways to Write is designed to equip children with key skills to move them through the writing process towards their final outcomes.  It is built around units of work that follow a mastery approach to the teaching of writing.  To support this approach, clear detailed lesson plans and resources are linked to a high-quality text.  Pathways to Write ensures engaging and purposeful English lessons.  The units can be used thematically to encourage a whole school approach to writing with the opportunity for topics to link across year groups.

Each unit covers a range of areas in the National Curriculum:

• Mastery of vocabulary, grammar and punctuation skills
• Writing a range of genres across a year
• Vocabulary development
• Using a wider range of reading comprehension strategies as a whole class
• Spoken language activities including drama and presentations
• Opportunities for practising previously taught genres
• An extended, independent piece of writing

This process follows three stages:

The Gateway (1-2 sessions)

• Begin at the Gateway with a 'hook' session to intrigue and enthuse young writers
• Use objects, people, images or role-play to stimulate questions about the chosen text
• Give children the opportunity to predict the text
• Establish the purpose and audience of the writing
• Revisit previous mastery skills and ongoing skills

The Pathway (10 sessions)

• Introduce children to three new writing skills from their year group curriculum
• Provide opportunities to practise and apply the skills they have learnt through short and extended writing tasks including character descriptions, poetry, dialogue between characters, fact files or diary entries in role
• Provide opportunities to re-cap and apply previously taught skills
• Challenge greater depth writers through a wider range of tasks e.g. changes to form, viewpoint and audience

Writeaway (4 sessions)

• Section and sequence texts independently or collaboratively
• Create extended pieces of writing over time
• Opportunity to apply mastery skills
• Time for planning, writing, checking, editing, redrafting and publishing
• A fiction or non-fiction outcome will be written (covering a wide range of genres and themes over the year)

Children who are below Age Related Expectations (ARE)

The Progression in Mastery Skills map is used to support teachers in tracking skills back for children working below age-related expectations.  For example, if children in year 5 are not ready to be using relative clauses (if this is one of the mastery keys), tracking back through the document might take the focus back to year 1 if this is where the child is working at.  The focus would then be joining clauses using and instead of relative clauses.

Children working at Greater Depth

The ideas and work are pitched at ARE, but there are suggested activities for greater depth children in most lessons and for every final writing outcome.

Poetry - Pathways to Poetry

At Lawn, we also follow a mastery approach to teaching poetry through the programme 'Pathways to Poetry'.  Each year group will complete 2 units of poetry per year, each unit lasting approximately 1-2 weeks.  This approach to teaching poetry ensures full coverage of poetry in the National Curriculum as well as many spoken language objectives.  throughout these units, a wide range of poetry forms and styles are investigated with progression in writing skills weaved throughout.  Through the teaching of these poetry units, we aim to focus on collaboration and group work, enhance work on vocabulary, spoken language, reading and writing and develop performance poetry.

Planning follows the sequence below:

Session 1: Gateway

This is an opportunity to hook the children into the context of learning.  They will be introduced to at least one poem and will have the opportunity to learn all or part of it by heart.

Session 2-4: Pathways

The first sessions focus on reading and comparing poetry.  Children will identify the poetry keys in poems before beginning to collect language and develop ideas ready for composing their own poems.

Session 5: Writeaway

This is a focus on writing composition.  Children will investigate a model poem and share with a friend.  They will plan and write their own version of a poem.

The Poetry Keys

The poetry keys are listed at the start of each unit.  These are taken from the 'Poetry Feature Keys Progress' document to ensure progression in poetry devices and language.  Each unit has two poetry keys which are developed throughout the unit

Teaching

The school is aware of the various elements of English that contributes to children's writing development and will organise lessons and activities according to the skills being developed and the age and development stages of children as follows:

Phonics & Spelling: At Lawn Primary School, phonics is taught using Jolly Phonics, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.  The delivery and content of phonics sessions will adhere to the school's Phonics policy

Spelling: At Lawn Primary, we follow Jolly Phonics spelling programme from Years R-6.  Children in Year 1 along with children in year 2, who have not passed their Phonics Screening Check, will continue to follow the Jolly Phonics programme as part of an intervention. But will continue onto Jolly Grammar along with their peers.

Grammar & Punctuation: At Lawn Primary these are taught both within the Pathways to Write lessons and Jolly Grammar lessons.

Handwriting - Kinetic Letters

Kinetic Letters® is a handwriting programme for use in primary and secondary schools.

Four main threads of:

• Making bodies stronger
• Holding the pencil
• Learning the letters
• Flow and fluency

It enables children to develop legible handwriting that is produced quickly and automatically.  With the development of automaticity, handwriting becomes a valuable tool and not a hindrance to learning.

The Kinetic Letters® font covers all the letters in the alphabet and is based on a set of rules that have been made as simple as possible to enable fast learning.  The order in which letters are taught recognises the cognitive development of children.

The programme can be used with any reading programme including phonics.  Initially reading and writing are taught separately (as recommended by phonics programmes); later on, reading and writing are combined.

Strength: Writing is a fine finger operation; children must have core body and arm strength to be able to control their fingers precisely.

Pencil hold: The pencil/pen grip must be comfortable to allow writing for long periods (e.g. exams often last for hours). Pens and pencils with a triangular cross-section assist in developing the correct hold.

Letter formation: The movements to form the letters begin with whole body movements and progress through writing in sand trays to writing on whiteboards and finally writing on paper.  In Kinetic Letters®, all letters and numbers are formed by one of two monkeys, a brave one (Bounce) who goes to the top branch of the tree, and a scared one (Skip) who goes to the lower branches.

Flow and fluency: Letter movements are minimised to help a fast writing style to develop.  There are no lead-in strokes

Our handwriting scheme is taught from Reception - Year 6 if fluency has not been achieved earlier.

Impact

Children's writing ability will be assessed in line with the school's Assessment Policy.

The EYFS Profile will be completed for each child in the final term of the year in which they reach age five.  All classes are subject to ensuring children are progressing in their writing.  Close monitoring and pupil progress meetings ensure:

• Children's developing abilities as writers are assessed through ongoing formative assessment.  This process occurs through daily interactions with learners, marking and verbal feedback, modelled examples and even better if challenges in yellow.
• The children's portfolio of writing produced from the short purposeful writing tasks in the Pathways and the Writeaway piece of writing provide clear assessment information for making end of term and end of year judgements and also provide a wealth of information for moderation across year groups.  We also moderate with the schools in out trust.  Writing assessment grids for each year group are used as a tool to support assessment of groups or individuals.
• As for all core subjects, class assessment data for writing is captured every term.  Assessment judgements are derived through analysis of progress against the writing statements and the agreed methods used to convert these to the relevant statement on the school attainment and progress system Arbor.

Working at the expected standard - A child whose work evidences all of the highlighted objectives across several pieces of writing would be on track for expected standard at the end of the year.

Working towards the expected standard - Children who have not been able to evidence all of the highlighted objectives in their writing would be working towards and may need to be targeted in the areas they have not been able to evidence.

Working at greater depth within the expected standard - Children who are demonstrating writing at greater depth will have consistently evidenced all the objectives across a range of writing, including in writing across the curriculum.  There should also be highlighting of the relevant greater depth objectives in the top right hand side box of the grids.

If areas for development are identified by the writing assessment grids/marking and feedback, particularly in independent writing, this will inform tailored intervention and support.