Writing

The skill of writing enables children to communicate with others while sharing their knowledge and ideas. It encourages expression and higher order thinking skills. At St Andrew’s C of E Primary School, we aim to create a culture of writing in our school that ensures our children are given the best opportunities to build their capacity and confidence in writing. By creating a stimulating environment, a broad and balanced curriculum and valuing the writing process, we provide all pupils with an inspiring and supportive writing curriculum which will allows learners to recognise their full potential and develop their: English skills, creativity, inquiry, confidence and independence.

Foundation Stage

In Foundation Stage 1 and 2, the learning of writing follows the Early Years Foundation Stages Framework. Children are given opportunities to extend their understanding of language learning through play and investigation, developing their characteristics of learning.

Key Stage 1 and 2

English lessons are used to inspire creativity, create language rich learning environments and teach explicit grammar and punctuation rules. These lessons are based on high quality texts, often suggested by the Write Stuff. However, teachers also choose their own high quality texts and plan well structured writing lessons around these texts. Writing composition is taught explicitly to the children through high quality teacher modelling. Whilst modelling writing, teachers 'think out loud' so the children can listen to the thoughts, feelings and decisions a writer may face during the writing process. Through high quality modelling, children gain an insight into the decisions that are considered and choices that are made when writing which they can then apply as they go through the writing process themselves.

Our English lessons endeavour to equip our children with the knowledge and skills they will need to become confident writers. English lessons often concentrate on the teaching of writing with a sharp focus on the craft and construction of sentences. We enjoy sharing vocabulary choices, ideas and opinions in our lessons through 'chotting' (chatting and jotting) before high quality modelling of writing takes place. When combined, these two elements encourage children to confidently think about their own ideas and vocabulary choices before they write for themselves.

Our children love celebrating their hard work and amazing writing with others. Children feel proud when adding their sentences to our class working wall to form our very own collaborative piece of writing. Please take a look at our fantastic writing below.

Published Pieces of Writing

It is expected that each child will complete a range of different pieces of published writing a year. There will be a balance of non fiction, fiction and one poem. After we have built up the skills and knowledge that we need during our English lessons, we will then start to plan our very own piece of writing. Some of these incredible pieces of work will be drafted, proofread, edited, redrafted and copied up neatly as a ‘published’ piece. Please see some photos of the writing process below.

Each child has Perfectly Published Portfolio where these 'published pieces' are recorded to encourage pride in their work. Please take a look at some of our incredible published pieces of writing below.