Skip to content ↓

Bishop Creighton Academy

Writing

Intent

 

 

 

 

At Bishop Creighton Academy, we strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. We maintain through each key stage and year group that we want our children to develop their vocabulary understanding, write in a range of different genres and continuously develop their spelling, grammar, and punctuation skills.

Implementation

Our programmes of study for writing at key stages 1 and 2 consistent of two key dimensions

  • transcription (spelling and handwriting)
  • composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing)

We aim to develop pupils’ skills in these two dimensions.  In addition, pupils are also taught how to plan, revise and evaluate their writing.

Writing down ideas fluently depends on effective transcription: that is, on spelling quickly and accurately through knowing the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) and understanding the morphology (word structure) and orthography (spelling structure) of words.

Effective composition involves forming, articulating and communicating ideas, and then organising them coherently for a reader. This requires clarity, awareness of the audience, purpose and context, and an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Writing also depends on fluent, legible and, eventually, speedy handwriting.

To enable our children to write effectively and coherently, we teach writing using 'The Write Stuff' approach by Jane Considine. This approach is used from EYFS to Year 6 and allows children to apply basic skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge to write effective sentences, which are full of impact and keep the reader interested. 'The Write Stuff' brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced though the 'Writing Rainbow', using the three zones of writing:

From 'The Writing Rainbow', symbols are used to support children within their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.

As part of the teaching sequence, teachers plan experience days; sentence stacking lessons and independent writing sequences. Experience days immerse children in experiences linked to their writing and drench them in vocabulary linked to the lenses in 'The Writing Rainbow'. From the experience days, children take part in the sentence stacking lessons. Sentence stacking lessons include effective demonstration writing from the teacher and the writing of three high-quality sentences with focus on different lenses from the rainbow. Children are also given the opportunity to 'Deepen The Moment' and add more to their writing using a lens of their choice. Independent writing sequences give children the opportunity to showcase everything they've learnt in their experience days and sentence stacking lessons.

Over their time at Bishop Creighton Academy, children will write a range of genres focused on high-quality texts. The chosen texts and genres cover a wide range of themes, including cultural, social and physical diversity.  All fiction texts are explored through a central character, where the children put themselves in their position and focus on the highs and lows of story events and discuss the range of emotions from plot point to plot point.

All year groups have a yearly overview, which includes both Fiction and Non-Fiction texts for Writing. The texts chosen have been carefully considered to ensure children have access to a rich and diverse reading diet. The yearly overviews ensure that children encounter a wide range of text types throughout their school career and have the opportunity to build on prior learning within their current year group and year-on-year.

Impact

Children will progress through and eventually leave Bishop Creighton Academy being able to;

  • Write for a range of purposes - both narrative and non fiction texts
  • Use their vast knowledge vocabulary to excite, inform or entertain the reader
  • Understand a range of punctuation and the effect it can have on the reader in both writing and reading
  • Understand the various sentence types that can be used to support different genres
  • Spell using their phonetic knowledge and spelling rules put in place
  • Speak clearly, fluently and coherently, to be able to listen attentively with understanding, pleasure and empathy and contribute to group discussions effectively