Our Writing Curriculum
Intention
At St George’s C.E. Primary School, we understand that writing is an essential part of the curriculum; we are ambitious about what our children can achieve and strive to create exciting and stimulating writing opportunities for all children.
We are proud of our writing and celebrate it using peers, other classes and regional/national competitions as an audience.
We aim for ALL our children to become confident, fluent writers who are able to use the wide range of writing tools they have accesseed and developed whilst on their writing journey with us.
Implementation
At St George’s C.E. Primary school, we ensure that all children see themselves as a writer. We follow ‘The Write Stuff’ from Reception (summer term) through to Year 6. The Write Stuff is the work of the teacher, author and education consultant Jane Considine.
‘The Write Stuff’ brings clarity to the mechanics of writing and provides clear systems through which to focus the writer's attention.
The combination of fiction and non-fiction units we have carefully selected to follow provide children throughout their journey with the experience of a wide range of high quality texts and authors. In our lessons, teachers follow a repeated pattern of 'Initiate', 'Model' and 'Enable' whereby they use the three zones of writing to provide a consistent whole school systematic approach to writing carefully constructed sentences.
The FANTASTICs offers 9 lenses with which to structure ideas and target children's thinking. This supports children in developing variety in their writing by focussing on the vocabulary used, initiating ideas, provoking thoughts and igniting imaginations.
The GRAMMARISTICS focus on the improtance of accuarate grammar where tools are taught and used immediately to help children develop fascination around language so that they can manipulate and carefully structure words into sentences.
The BOOMTASTICs focus on the art of writing, using a range of literary devices and techniques to make careful choices, playing with language to add flair to our writing and achieve various intentional impacts on our reader, painting vivid pictures through our word choices.
High expectations are coupled with careful monitoring and scaffolding, ‘holding the hands’ of our children and looking at the mathematics of a sentence so that they feel ready to write independently using the wide range of writing tools they have been trained to use.
Impact
Children will be respected as an individual writer, provided with regular opportunities to make individual choices and encouraged to develop their own creativity. Regular practise of key writing skills will provide children with the confidence to apply these in a range of independent situations whereby they have the chance to show what they have internalised. The range of writing experiences we provide will enable all children to alter their long term memory and knowledge more, remember more and be able to do more as writers.
We assess the impact of our childrens' writing through a variety of different approaches.
Foramtive assessment is used continuously to assess the progress of individual children within the unit of work and to inform future planning and differentiation of the progression of genres.
At the end of each term, 'Performance Statements' are used to support the summative assessment of writing.
Through the triangulation of internal and external staff moderation, monitoring work in books and pupil voice, we gauge the progress and attainment being made by every child and address any issues as they arise.