Intent

At Meadowside Primary School our aim is that every child will learn to write, and love to write, by being given real and exciting materials to inspire them; and by providing them with opportunities to write for different reasons and in different genres and contexts. We aim to provide all pupils at Meadowside with support to write using quality first teaching and clear, well planned progression across all aspects of writing at genre, sentence and word level. We understand that the spoken language, reading and writing are tightly interwoven and therefore we aim to use excellent reading materials and texts as well as examples of high quality writing to inspire pupils and to enable them to emulate these styles which helps pupils understand that their writing is for reading. We also aim to ensure language and vocabulary is built up from our youngest children in EYFS through to end of KS2, using our own school’s version of Talk for Writing in collaboration with our own assessment systems to ensure our children are able to write at the best of their ability. Handwriting is taught and practised across the whole school using the Kinetic Letters programme and we aim for pupils to write autonomously. At Meadowside, we aim for pupils to meet the spelling aims set out in the National Curriculum. In years 2-6 pupils are taught using the Read, Write, Inc. spelling programme. We also recognise the importance of applying writing skills across the wider curriculum and plan regularly for this to take place. 

Implementation

Writing Approach 

EYFS, KS1 and KS2 utilise quality texts to inform their English activities and lessons. The use of quality texts enhances pupils’ understanding of vocabulary in context, understanding of sentence structure and provide quality models for pupils to utilise. Where possible cross-curricular links are made to embed wider curriculum understanding as well as to meet National Curriculum age related expectations.

In EYFS pupils are provided with daily opportunities to write in their continuous provision, this allows pupils the chance to use their phonic knowledge to write words and simple sentences. Each week pupils have a dedicated writing session led by an adult, this writing is linked to a class text.

Writing happens during English lessons in KS1 as well as forming part of varied contextual responses in other subject areas, such as history, geography, science and RE.

In KS2 pupils are provided with daily opportunities to write. This allows pupils to not only build stamina for writing but to also focus on required grammatical knowledge to produce work at the National Curriculum age related expectation. These writing sessions are not always taught as discrete English lessons and may form part of other subject areas. Written responses form a large part (but are not the entirety) of other subject lessons. When utilised, these provide another context for our pupils to explore their skills and understanding of age-related writing expectations.

Talk for Writing

Each teacher/year group uses the objectives mapped out in the National Curriculum and the EYFS Framework as their foundation point and plans writing lessons using the writing sequence of learning document which provides a yearly overview of the content that should be taught in each year group. We plan our teaching sequence, based on our own version of Talk for Writing as we recognise the importance of speaking and listening, especially oracy, in its ability to support writing. Throughout the school we recognise that language plays an important role in helping pupils understand curriculum content, as it is a vital link to writing. Talk for Writing provides opportunities to develop oracy skills within all our writing teaching sequences and to support pupils’ thinking and organisation of writing. Each Talk for Writing unit uses high quality model texts and the teaching sequences include cold writes, deliberate practice and hot writes. A cold write is used to assess pupils’ knowledge and understanding at the beginning of a unit. During a unit, a teacher carefully plans a sequence of lessons that supports pupils’ to achieve an outcome linked to the National Curriculum. These lessons include deliberate practice and opportunities for pupils to imitate and innovate a high quality example. At the end of a unit a hot write is used to assess pupils’ learning (independent application). Grammar and punctuation is threaded and planned carefully across each teaching sequence and in context of the writing so that children can see the purpose and how it is used.

Handwriting- Kinetic Letters 

Meadowside Primary uses the Kinetic Letters programme to provide our children with an automatic response to letter formation that allows pupils to concentrate their effort on the content on their writing. The programme focuses on building physical strength for writing so the sessions have active and interactive elements to inform desired letter formation. Our children are taught the Kinetic Letters approach from EYFS, which supports their understanding of letter families. By the end of KS1 pupils are expected to write fluently with clear letter formation and are beginning to join letters upon entry to KS2. Once our writers have mastered size relative, clear and consistent letter formation and joining, our UKS2 pupils develop their own individual legible style. The training received in earlier years within the Kinetic Letters programme supports children in building a legible style with clarity for their reader.

Read, Write, Inc. Spelling

Spellings are linked directly with phonics teaching for our youngest pupils and years 2-6 are taught using the RWI Spelling programme which fulfils the spelling requirements of the NC and ensure a consistent teaching approach across the school. Pupils will learn to spell with confidence and clarity. These sessions build upon the phonetic knowledge pupils have acquired in EYFS and KS1 and are taught daily using the RWI approach of systematic teaching so the knowledge is continually practised and committed to pupils’ long term memory. As well as practising phonetic based spellings, pupils learn to spell common exception words (red words) that cannot be decoded and teachers support pupils to spell commonly misspelt words (orange words).

Impact

Our intended impact is to meet the aims and rationale set out in our initial intention. We will measure the impact of our implementation against our intention through regular scheduled book scrutiny, formative and summative assessment (against Target Tracker statements) as well as pupil/parent/teacher voice. Subject leaders and SLT will perform pupil progress meetings to analyse and discuss pupil’s learning, progress and attainment against National Curriculum age related expectations.