Writing
Curriculum Intent
At The Brent Primary School, we strive to equip our children with the skills and knowledge to become creative and effective writers. We aim to ensure all of our children develop a genuine love of language and the written word.
We ensure that children develop an understanding of how vital written skills are to everyday life and, therefore, how important and useful the skills are that they are learning.
By equipping them with access to high-quality texts, we strive to provide children with models to emulate and opportunities to develop a wide and varied vocabulary.
Careful links are made across the curriculum to ensure that children’s English learning is rehearsed and developed. Through developing fluent writing skills children will be able to express their knowledge and learning in meaningful ways irrespective of the subject area.
Implementation
- High quality texts are used as a stimulus for writing and give rise to exposure of a variety of genres of writing in meaningful contexts.
- Talk for Writing is used throughout the school to enable children to learn and internalise story structures and to rehearse spoken English skills. Through this children gain the confidence and skills needed for written story writing. Talk for Writing fundamentally teaches children how to be writers – not just how to write. It supports children to be able to generate ideas, draw upon their reading and write confidently for a variety of audiences and purposes.
- Through the children’s time at The Brent, children gradually build their bank of well-known texts, supplemented by picture books, novels, poems and non-fiction books. Gradually, this living library of language begins to equip the children with the words they need to express themselves.
- Teachers use both modelled writing and shared writing to demonstrate and teach writing strategies. Modelled writing is ambitious and is aimed at the higher age expectations for the year group taught.
- Children’s vocabulary is extended by highlighting the ‘Word of the Week’. This is a focus on high-level vocabulary across the whole school. Through this, children are enabled to develop a bank of ambitious vocabulary for use in their writing. Children are encouraged to write for extended periods of time using the build up from the taught sessions in order to develop writing stamina. This may be through writing for a purpose across our IGNITE curriculum.
- Opportunities to revisit, revise and improve writing are built into lessons using marking comments. Children revisit pieces of writing in order to extend and improve their own work using purple editing pens.
- Through the weekly delivery of three spelling focus sessions (taught and rehearsal of spelling patterns) and two grammar focus sessions, we ensure children have the technical understanding of English to underpin their reading and writing.
- Children are taught to write legibly, fluently and at a reasonable speed. Handwriting follows the school’s preferred style which is fully cursive from Year 2. Teachers model cursive writing when writing for the class and when marking books.
Opening Doors
An Opening Doors approach is used throughout the school to develop children’s inferential and reasoning skills. The approach begins by using interesting cropped images to spark children’s imagination, make links with their prior learning and in turn learn how to make high-quality inferences and predictions.
Impact
Through exposure to high-quality texts and a wide variety of writing genres, children are equipped with the skills to write for a variety of purposes, across a range of contexts.
Through regular formative assessment, children’s writing is developed and extended
