How Do We Teach Writing At East Coker School?

At East Coker, we teach and encourage the children to embrace their creativity, enthusiasm and writing skills to accurately compose for a given audience and purpose. Writing is a way of communicating our thinking with others and therefore, being able to write and communicate effectively is an important life skill.

We aim for all of our children to:

•         Enjoy writing and recognise its value and purpose within the wider world

•         Be able to write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences

•         Have knowledge of a wide range of sophisticated vocabulary

•         Write in Standard English with a good knowledge of grammatical features

•         Display excellent transcription skills to ensure their writing is well presented and 

          shows the accuracy in the use of punctuation and spelling.

•         Learn how to share their knowledge, opinion and imaginative creativity

Our Approach to Teaching Writing

We use the National Curriculum and EYFS Framework to inform the planning and delivery of the writing curriculum. We focus on writing for different purposes: to entertain, inform, persuade and discuss.

The components of writing are taught explicitly in literacy lessons and the skills learnt are regularly reinforced across other curriculum areas. To support the successful delivery of the writing curriculum, we use carefully selected resources from The Literary Curriculum, Literacy Shed and 'The Write Stuff'. 

Writing is a complex task and we apply a variety of teaching and learning styles within our literacy lessons, in order to meet the needs of all our pupils.

Lessons may include: short focussed tasks such as sentence composition, a grammar or spelling focus, vocabulary building, drama activities, teacher modelling, extended writing or the shared exploration of a text type.

Children need to see quality writing in order to be able to produce it, therefore our writing curriculum is built around high-quality, ambitious texts that enable children to understand the craft of writing. Relevant real-life events and experiences are also used to make learning fun, meaningful and memorable.

The use of spoken language is imperative to development of writing. Therefore, we provide ample talk opportunities in each lesson through the use of class discussion, talk partners, small group work and drama activities. This provides children with time to orally explore a text type before they start to write.

Our teaching of SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) is consistent and follows a progressive framework. Grammar and punctuation objectives are taught in literacy lessons, either as the focus of the lesson or as part of the writing process.

Where possible, SPaG teaching will link to the genre being taught to provide children with the opportunity to apply their learning.

In Reception, we develop children’s gross and fine motor skills, through threading activities, using play-dough, scissors, etc. These motor skills are important for children’s physical development and allow them to develop the skills to write.  We teach children to use a correct pencil grip – tripod grip, to sit up straight and face forwards when writing. Children are taught letter formation and to write using capital letters to start sentences, full stops to end sentences and finger spaces between words.

Our strong phonics programme, provides many further opportunities for developing the children’s spelling and handwriting skills.

In KS1 (years 1 and 2), we embed these basic skills and further develop them, teaching question marks and exclamation marks.  We also begin to teach grammar skills – plurals, adjectives, nouns, noun phrases.  By the end of year 2, children should be able to write a legible joined script, using paragraphs and including the grammar and punctuation taught in KS1.

In KS2 (years 3-6), children are taught further grammar and punctuation skills and are also taught how to use content to engage the reader.  Alongside explicit grammar and spelling lessons, children are able to use these skills to improve their writing and use these to effectively write for different audiences and purposes.

Editing and redrafting writing allows children to have enough working memory free to concentrate on content when they write, whilst having the opportunity to improve their grammar, punctuation and spelling through regular editing and redrafting sessions.

Handwriting

Fluent transcription skills are the foundations of writing and research shows that, if spelling and handwriting are not fluent, pupils find it more difficult to focus on composition.

In Reception, children are taught to form recognisable letters as part of the Read Write Inc. Phonics Programme. 

From Year 1, we develop the children’s ability to write by introducing cursive handwriting in step-by-step stages in line with the National Curriculum. We provide opportunities for children to develop, practise and perfect skills and provide targeted support to any child experiencing difficulty.

Spelling

The EEF Improving Literacy in KS2 Guidance Report states:

‘Fast and accurate spelling of an extensive vocabulary is a key component of writing fluency. Many of the skills that support word reading will also support spelling, but spelling demands greater specificity and has different motor demands. There is limited high quality evidence about how to teach spelling, but it is clear that spelling should be actively taught rather than simply tested’.

Throughout Key Stage 1 and 2, we use Spelling Shed to support the teaching and learning of spelling. This approach allows us to build on the children’s previously learned phonic knowledge and allows us to focus on three main components of spelling:

Orthography –We break down spellings into the smallest units of sound and cluster

                      them into syllables in order to read and write effectively.

Morphology – Children will study words; word parts; their meanings and how this

                       affects spelling.

Etymology –    We teach the children about the origin of the words that they are

                        learning to spell.

Assessment in Writing

We continually assess the children’s independent work against writing objectives and success criteria, providing them will meaningful teacher feedback. Children are also encouraged to self-assess their own writing, and that of their peers, in order to develop an understanding of their own goals.

At regular intervals throughout the year, children work independently to produce a piece of writing which is then assessed against age-related expectations to ensure they are meeting the required standards.