Writing at Saint Patrick’s Catholic Primary School

Intent

Our aim is to develop a love of both reading and writing in the children at St. Patrick’s Primary School and staff will nurture this love by themselves modelling a love of reading and writing and a passion to share this experience with the children. We enjoy teaching high quality texts and engaging pupils in the magical world of both fiction and non-fiction writing.

Implementation

The National Curriculum for English (2014), with specific reference to writing aims to ensure that all pupils:

• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
•  appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences

We are currently developing our English teaching through Emma Caulfield’s Planning to teach writing; A practical guide for primary school teachers. We use Immersion (in the text), Imitation (developing writers’ tips and vocabulary) and Innovation (Extended writing ) and are now incorporating more of Emma Caulfield’s  methods, such as developing shared and modelled writing, including writers ’skills in ’short burst writing’, leading to a final extended piece over a series of lessons. We also include in our planning elements of South Gloucestershire Recovery Planning (Claire Ridsdale) which promotes the specific teaching of Grammar Skills in pupils extended pieces.

Our whole school text mapping ensures that pupils study texts from a range of genres and that there is progression within text types.

We plan an effective English curriculum which will meet the needs of all learners; making adjustments where necessary to ensure that children with Special Educational Needs and those who are categorised as Disadvantaged Learners are able to achieve their full potential. 

Teachers demonstrate high quality modelling within each Literacy lesson and encourage children to include key vocabulary (linked to their Topic), structure their work appropriately into coherent paragraphs and use the grammatical skills and punctuation taught at their year group level.

In addition to English lessons, pupils are given opportunities to use their writing skills across the curriculum. Saint Patrick’s Catholic Primary School intends to develop writing as a transferrable skill across all subjects taught in the curriculum. Our aim is to provide engaging writing hooks that are linked to each termly topic to give children an audience and purpose for writing. Children are expected to transfer their key topic knowledge and vocabulary into their writing and vice versa to transfer their spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge into their topic work.

Assessment:

Staff assess pupils each half term against Year group specific objectives. However formative assessment is a continual part of the writing process and informal assessments take place regularly as staff guide their pupils towards the next steps in their writing journey.

Pupils who are identified as not achieving age-related outcomes and/or those on the SEN register are assessed against outcomes most suitable to their current stage. Daily interventions/support may be put in place in order to accelerate writing skills in this case. The nature of the intervention will be decided by the teacher and the SENDCO. Examples of support in class includes small group work with an adult during lessons to model key skills, scaffolds created by the teacher to assist with completion of work and word banks/sentence openers provided to assist the child when writing.

Impact

• Through the teaching of writing using high quality texts, our aim is that pupils are able to communicate fluently and confidently using their writing.
• Pupils are able to write succinctly for a range of purposes, using correct writing features, grammatical techniques and apply correct spelling rules.
• Pupils are able to compose extended pieces of fiction and non-fiction as well as to demonstrate their understanding in foundation subjects