Writing

Intent - What does writing look like at The Greville?

High quality texts that inspire reading and writing are at the core of our English curriculum. This means that, by the time our children leave in Year 6, they will have been immersed in a wide and diverse range of excellent children’s literature. Through this, we aspire for children to love writing and to be able to communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions with purpose, independence accuracy and confidence.

At The Greville, we recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where all children, regardless of their starting point, can enjoy and take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately and are able to adapt their language and style for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. We want pupils to acquire a wide vocabulary, a solid understanding of grammar and be able to spell new words by effectively applying their knowledge of spelling patterns and rules. We believe that writing is not limited to the English ‘lesson’ and therefore children are provided with many opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills in other areas of the curriculum. We encourage our children to become reflective writers who are able to refine and edit their work as well as being given the opportunity to celebrate and share their writing.

Implementation - How are we going to deliver this?

The implementation of The Greville writing curriculum ensures a consistent and systematic approach to teaching the skills of writing from EYFS through to Year 6.  The majority of our writing stimuli are also used in whole class reading sessions as we believe that reading and writing are inextricably linked. By studying the text in both reading and writing sessions, children are encouraged to make links and become empathetic and ambitious writers. Based on evidence-informed research, we have created The Greville Writing Process, which means that children know what to expect as they transition through the school.

There are six stages of the writing process:

• Immersion – engaging children in a stimulus and making connections and links
• Generating Ideas – exploring vocabulary and model texts linked to the writing focus
• Rehearsal – short, sharp, purposeful tasks to practise skills needed (including oral rehearsal)
• Initial Write – following planning and class/teacher modelling, children draft their writing
• Review and Revise – children are taught the skills to edit and improve their writing
• Publish and Share – children share and celebrate their writing in relation to the intended purpose and audience.

As part of the rehearsal stage, we explicitly teach children a range of sentence structures that they can use in their writing, based on Alan Peat’s ‘Writing Exciting Sentences’. From Year 2 onwards, children will learn around 6 sentence types that they build on each year. These have been selected to coincide with the expectations of the National Curriculum.

Yearly overviews, unit planning and the use of progression maps ensure that a variety of genres are progressively taught and built upon both throughout the year and throughout the school. Children have daily English (writing) lessons, which are carefully planned and scaffolded to ensure that all children are challenged and can achieve. Timely and specific feedback provides all pupils with support on their learning as to their areas of strength and areas that need to be developed further.

Impact - What difference is this curriculum making to our children?

The intended impact is that all pupils at The Greville will have the knowledge and skills to be able to write successfully for a range of purposes and audiences and that pupils of all abilities will be able to succeed in English lessons because learning will be appropriately scaffolded and challenging.

By the end of Key Stage 2, children will have developed a writer’s craft, will have stamina for sustained writing and understand how language, grammar and punctuation can be manipulated for effect. As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, skills taught in the English lessons are transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific language, grammar and punctuation. We measure the impact of our teaching through regular assessment (both formal and informal) as well as internal and external moderation.