English

We aim to:

• Guide and nurture each individual on their own personal journeys to becoming successful writers
• Provide exciting writing opportunities and experiences that engage and inspire all pupils
• Help children become confident in the skills of speaking and listening, and to use them to inspire their writing
• Ensure children have a good knowledge of phonics as a springboard to becoming fluent writers
• Ensure children acquire a wide vocabulary and are able to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they learn
• Ensure children have a good knowledge of grammar and punctuation, and apply it effectively to their writing
• Encourage them to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
• Create writers who can re-read, edit and revise their own writing
• Encourage them to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in part by developing a legible, cursive, individual handwriting style by the time they move to secondary school
• Provide a progressive curriculum to build upon previous teaching, with regular assessment to ensure each child’s needs are met to reach their full potential

With these aims in mind, English and separate reading sessions are timetabled daily across all year groups. We passionately believe that reading and writing are inextricably linked therefore studying the text in both reading and writing sessions encourages children to make links and become empathetic and ambitious writers.

Genres and writing purposes

Throughout the school, writing is taught through the use of rich texts, which give the opportunity for children to read as writers, exposing them to inference; high-level vocabulary; and a range of punctuation and grammatical structures. Each text is purposefully selected in order to inspire high quality writing from each child.

Long, medium and short term planning and the use of progression maps ensure that a variety of genres are progressively taught and built upon both throughout the year and throughout the school. These fall under four main writing purposes: 

• Writing to entertain (KS1 and KS2)
• Writing to inform (KS1 and KS2)
• Writing to persuade (KS2 only)
• Writing to discuss (Upper KS2 only)

Each year group teaches the explicit grammar, punctuation and spelling objectives required for that age group. These are taught both as stand-alone lessons and through the process of writing, with grammar objectives linked to the writing purpose.

Writing is also a key focus in the wider curriculum, especially in ‘Topic’ lessons. Children are given the opportunity to transfer and build upon their knowledge of a writing purpose studied during English lessons and apply this learning to a topic focus.

Through the rich texts-based writing process, children will acquire and learn the skills to plan, draft and refine their written work over time and are encouraged to develop independence in being able to identify their own areas for improvement in all pieces of writing.