English - Writing

Our intent for writing

At Spurcroft we believe that a high-quality English curriculum is essential in enabling our children to participate fully as a member of society. We aim to foster a lifelong love of language by ensuring our curriculum draws on our rich and varied literacy heritage and equips our children with a strong command of of the spoken and written word. Our ambition is that all children to be able to confidently communicate their ideas. 
We want our children to be able to write easily, and fluently showing understanding of writing and grammar knowledge expected in the National Curriculum. As they go through school they become increasingly accurate writers. Pupils learn about and compose writing in different genres and styles, and for a range of purposes and audiences. 

At Spurcroft we believe that quality writing will come from engagement in quality texts. We follow "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine from Years 1-6. The texts have been carefully chosen to engage learners and provide them with tools and structures that can be applied to their own writing.  

When selecting units from "The Write Stuff" we ensure we have included books from a range of different time and cultures and represent our diverse world. In addition to the planned texts to enagage writing, a range of other high-quality texts have been chosen for each year group for story times. This promotes vocabulary development and a love of reading. 

Pupils in Early Years, Year 1 and Year 2 follow Read Write Inc plans for writing.  
 

How do we teach writing at Spurcroft?

Read Write Inc

In EYFS and Year 1 our writing Curriculum is taught following the programme of ‘Read Write Inc.’ This is an approved systematic synthetic phonics programme.

Within the writing element of this children are taught from reception to form letters, spell words, use punctuation then develop ideas into sentences. Children move from daily speed sounds lessons initially in reception to following the full ‘Get Writing’ programme where children will ‘hold a sentence’ from a known text which they have read in class then ‘build a sentence’ from their own ideas.

The Write Stuff

Once a child has completed the Read, Write Inc phonics programme a child will be taught English through a 30 minute daily Guided Reading lesson, followed by a 1 hour English lesson following "The Write Stuff." This  approach is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days, which are opportunities to immerse and engage children in the text, and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into three chunks and taught under the structural framework of the lenses of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing. Children then use the model to support them to write their own independent sentences. The unit finishes with a fully independent write where the children use all of the grammar and ideas that they have been taught to produce their own work. 

Revisions, editing and publishing

Children begin to use purple pens for revising and editing their work from KS1. After each chunk or paragraph, children re-read their work and use their purple pen to make revisions, such as improving vocabulary, or editing for spelling and punctation. Following an independent write, teachers model how to fully revise and edit based on the lenses of The Writing Rainbow that have been taught. Finally, children celebrate their finished work by publishing their writing.