Button Lane Primary School

Writing

Writing Lead - Miss Abdelmawla

Writing Curriculum Intent 

Writing is an integral part of the curriculum at Button Lane connected with the teaching of reading and speaking and listening, and developed through all areas of the school curriculum. At Button Lane, we want to ensure that writing skills empower individuals to unlock their potential as independent, lifelong learners, through developing self-esteem, motivation and aspirations for the future, allowing them to understand the purpose of writing and gain skills to thrive. 

Our English curriculum offer is shaped to inspire a love of reading, writing and literature through using high quality and varied texts, as a stimulus to shape our children's understanding and spark creativity and imagination. Speaking and listening is a main driver in our curriculum and begins in the Early Years Foundation stage to help diminish word gap, develop language and ensure our children can communicate effectively within their writing.

The planning and delivery of our writing curriculum provides a bond between our values, ethos and the national curriculum through bespoke planning and delivery for the needs of our children. We aim to instill a spiraling progression of skills from the Early Years Foundation Stage to year 6, which provide children with a solid understanding of narrative and non-fiction text types, which are progressive across all years. We strive to deliver our writing lessons around our children interests, beginning with a hook and then providing lots of opportunities to read as both a reader and a writer. This allows our children to gather content and  encourages a strong understanding of grammar, so children can utilise it accurately, whether in writing or editing. 

 We equip our children with key skills, knowledge and vocabulary to open gateways for lifelong learning.

Our English curriculum aims to ensure that our children not only develop resilience to become primary literate but will also develop a love of reading, creative writing and purposeful speaking and listening, that is embedded across all areas of the curriculum.

Through English, we embrace our curriculum drivers:

• Developing speech and language,
• Increasing vocabulary and diminishing word gap,
• Providing real life experiences through opening the world around us,
• Unlocking self-esteem to motivate and aspire for the future,
• Developing cultural capital throughout their school life journey.

By giving this context to their learning, the children understand the value of English to them now and throughout their future life, believing that ‘only the best is good enough.

Implementation

Long term plans are implemented, to ensure high quality teaching and to provide a coverage of skills across the school. Key skills and knowledge are taught and revisited within each year and across year groups. Progression is mapped out across year groups from EYFS to year 6. Curriculum, progression maps and long term plans can be found on our website, in the writing curriculum section.

Writing lessons are planned towards units of work, which are creative, imaginative and engage the interests of our children across the school. The children are challenged within English through the use of high-quality texts to stimulate learning, providing progression of vocabulary and development of writing techniques.

 Each half term, teachers focus on the teaching of a narrative and a non-fiction unit of work, with poetry being taught at 3 points during the year. A clear purpose and an audience is decided from the outset, to ensure clearly refined teaching and learning. Our units focus on a spiralling progression of skills from Nursery to Year 6, which enables our children to progress into sophisticated and independent writers.

 Our units begin by gripping the children’s attention and creating interest with a link to the key text. Children are then provided with opportunities to ‘read as both a reader and a writer’. This enables them to develop a love for reading, whilst learning the features of different genres of texts and what they need to include, to be successful writers.

Grammar is taught discreetly within all writing units and where possible, links to the end of unit outcomes. This is taught directly through quality texts, modelled examples and investigation In Years 1-6, children are taught the appropriate grammar and punctuation as stipulated in the National Curriculum. The objectives have been broken down into smaller steps to ensure progression across school.  

 Within our units, we ensure that children have opportunities to produce additional, independent pieces of writing, as well as an assessment week at the end of each half term. This provides an opportunity to assess taught units of work. In addition, Writing is taught across the curriculum with children having the opportunity to apply taught skills from writing sessions, into other areas of learning. These opportunities for additional writing and assessment are mapped out on our long term planning.

Impact

By the end of Key Stage Two at Button Lane we expect that our children:

• Write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences, selecting appropriate language.
• Describe settings, characters and atmosphere in fictional writing.
• Integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action.
• Select vocabulary and grammatical structures that reflect the level of formality required in a piece of writing.
• Use a range of cohesive devices to make their writing flow, including conjunctions, adverbials of time and place, pronouns and synonyms within and across paragraphs.
• Use verb tenses consistently and correctly throughout their writing.
• Use a range of punctuation mostly correctly, including inverted commas and other punctuation to indicate direct speech.
• Spell most words correctly and use a dictionary to check the spelling of uncommon or more ambitious vocabulary.
• Maintain legibility in joined handwriting when writing at speed.

Our aim is to help children enjoy writing and to be able to express themselves across a range of genres, demonstrating their growing vocabulary and technical skills

In order for this to happen, the Writing leader and the Senior Leadership Team take responsibility for the monitoring of the Writing curriculum and the standards achieved by the children. The Writing leader monitors for appropriate pitch and progression and uses this to direct support and inform action planning

The impact of our writing curriculum offer is measured through our teaching, learning and monitoring cycle. This includes:

• Learning walks with pupil conversations and lesson observations to monitor the quality of writing in English and inform action planning, support and future CPD and to support pupil progress and intervention

• Book scrutiny - When books are collected in, we ensure an opportunity to discuss learning with the children selected.

• Summative assessment is used half termly to assess taught writing units and additional independent writing opportunities are frequent across taught units of work and the wider curriculum. This is used to support moderation and termly data analysis through Pupil Progress Meetings.
• Formative assessment within writing lessons to inform assessments and next steps
• Internal moderation across age phases with the subject lead are completed termly, as well as cluster moderation sessions to compare judgements across schools. We have produced expected and greater depth examples of texts to support teachers in making judgements.

• Lesson study cycles to target key groups of children across school, who may be underachieving
• Transition opportunities for our KS2 children, including engaging with our feeder High Schools

Triangulating data from pupil progress meetings with pupil voice/conferencing and book looks. We use data from pupil progress meetings to help monitor children who are not on track to achieving their potential or are not on track for achieving age related expectations or higher. Through collaborative discussion we use this to inform next steps for teaching and learning and any intervention needed.