Our Writing Intent
In line with our vision of Growing Greatness at Greenfield, English and writing is at the heart of everything we do in school. We want our children to have the confidence to see themselves as authors with their own voice as well as provide them with the skills they will need to write confidently and effectively throughout their school career and into their lives beyond school. We emphasise the value of writing by providing opportunities for written communication across the curriculum. The same standard of writing across all areas of the curriculum is a school expectation.
Where possible, our writing units are connected to our class books and curriculum themes to enable our children to make links and feel inspired. Our writing curriculum involves our children being able to analyse a variety of texts and styles to ensure they have a deep understanding of how our language works, enabling them to make choices and have greater control over their writing. By doing this, our children understand that careful word choice, sentence construction and style can encourage change in the world around them.
Our Great Greenfield Five values underpin the writing curriculum
Respect – this is essential for a productive and vibrant learning environment and when engaging with texts from diverse communities and cultures.
Resilience – we build on previous skills and knowledge and provide opportunities to be creative and experimental through our drafting process.
Responsibility – children take responsibility for their learning by editing and redrafting their work, responding to feedback, and ensuring that their presentation meets high expectations.
Collaboration – we make use of ambitious vocabulary which we embed throughout our curriculum. We use a process of teacher modelling and guided writes to support the learning of new skills and prepare our children to write independently.
Aspiration – as staff we model our own love of writing and vocabulary. We analyse and explore a variety of texts and provide opportunities for children to develop their own author’s voice.
At Kippax Greenfield, we recognise that writing is a fundamental life skill. It enables us to communicate confidently with different audiences, ensuring that we listen carefully to the ideas of others as well as sharing our own ideas, thoughts and opinions appropriately. Our approach to writing aims to enable children to discuss and write about topics that are important to us and share our views in a number of interesting ways.
We aim for mastery of spelling, punctuation, grammar and literary techniques and the importance of this is emphasised in every piece of written work across the curriculum. All pupils are capable of achieving high standards in Writing and are able to develop their own writer’s voice. Teaching is underpinned by providing real purposes and engagements for writing. A passion for writing is encouraged by using high-quality texts and digital literacy to inspire fiction writing and using our curriculum to drive a true purpose for nonfiction writing. Writing units are carefully structured to capture the process of writing through analysing literature, teacher-modelling, careful drafting, and most importantly editing and redrafting.
Spelling is taught explicitly and then embedded throughout the curriculum through continuous teacher modelling and discussion. In KS1, spelling is taught through Read, Write Inc. The principles of phonics teaching are used in the teaching of spelling throughout school.
Children have individual writing targets that they work on alongside their teacher and which are updated once mastered. Parents are informed of their child's progress in writing through informal discussions, parents’ evenings and an annual written report that identifies progress made and the next steps for improvement.
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