Writing Rationale
Aims:
- to equip children with the skills and knowledge to be a competent, confident writer;
- to inspire children as writers;
- to show children that writing can be for pleasure and a source of mindfulness.
At Chalford Hill, we aim to not only provide a broad base of knowledge and writing skills but also to demonstrate the joy writing can bring and the emotions it can unleash.
Drawing Club in EYFS and KS1
In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, we use a creative approach to writing using Drawing Club and Curious Quests.
Drawing Club incorporates story sharing, oracy, drawing, writing, vocabulary, mathematics, imagination and collaboration.
Each week we use a focus story or animation. The children learn new vocabulary linked to the story/animation and are invited to Drawing Club, where they may draw a character, setting or event. They can innovate their drawings and add secret passwords, magic powers or spells, hidden symbols, letters or numerals.
At the start of reception, the sessions may be purely mark making/drawing based but this will progress on throughout the year to labelling their drawings with initial sounds, CVC words and eventually writing sentences about their drawings.
Drawing Club develops to include writing sentences using simple punctuation and exploring features like alliteration and adjectives, following our school's writing progression document.
Drawing Club excites children with the magic world of tales and story, whilst enriching their language skills, developing their fine motor skills and into a love of writing. It immerses children into a world full of imagination where anything can happen and it often does. It develops a wide range of skills across the whole curriculum. Children’s creative streaks are enhanced as well as their ability to share ideas and skills. It provides an age-appropriate approach that is highly engaging.
The children love coming to Drawing Club!
Writing in KS2
There are three overarching stages to our writing blocks: experience lessons, sentence stacking lessons and an independent write.
Experience Lessons:
Immersive teaching to stimulate ideas. Experience lessons can take many forms - visits out, visitors in or drama conventions deployed to strengthen context and build imagination. The number of experiences included in a unit is at a teachers’ discretion. Experience lessons can be added or removed from a teaching sequence depending on the needs of pupils and knowledge of their previous experiences.
Sentence Stacking:
Children follow a method called ‘sentence stacking’ which refers to the fact that sentences are grouped together chronologically or organisationally. This approach encourages the children to engage with short, intensive moments of learning that they can apply immediately to their writing. Children learn to sentence stack, focusing on the style of the author and impact of words and sentences. The planning of these is based on the teacher’s assessment of the children’s learning needs. An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into three separate chunks:
For example (Y6):
Writing - "The Write Stuff"
Writing is centred on a high-quality text that captures the children's interest from the outset. The structure that is used to teach writing is a personalised approach based around best practice taken from 'The Write Stuff'. The focus is placed on a love of story, enrichment and language in order to create ‘impact writers’. Learning to write is a complex process and it is every child’s entitlement. To engage children in writing, we provide purposeful reasons to write where pupils learn to enjoy writing expressively, imaginatively and informatively for purpose. We make writing part of daily life, linked to play, fictional and real experiences. We encourage the children to develop personal voice, style, stamina and range as a writer.
We understand that developing children as writers is so much more than asking them to remember grammatical constructions or tricky spellings. It is a complicated and intricate process – and if you enable a child to become a writer you have given them a voice, supported them to communicate and provided them with a skill that is vital for all of their schooling and to their life beyond.
Other units delivered follow the same principles.
“Why write? Writing crystallises your ideas. It preserves them for others. It reveals the facets of your thinking. Good writing is creating a gem for others to discover.” – Jane Considine, The Write Stuff
Independent Writing:
At the end of each cycle of experience and sentence stacking lessons, the children plan, draft, edit and publish an independent piece of writing. Children independently choose their success criteria, select resources and write for a purpose and audience. These pieces are assessed, and teacher judgments are moderated within school and within our cluster of colleagues.
Greater Depth:
When writing, all children are writing about the same plot point in the story at the same time. During all stages of the lesson, especially the independent sentence creation, children are encouraged to 'Deepen the Moment' and challenge themselves to manipulate vocabulary and grammar effectively. This involves the pupils developing the moment or plot point that they are on by enriching the plot with more detail or with different lenses. This stops children from ‘plot pushing’ and moving on to the next section before the rest of the class. It means that everybody is writing about the same moment at the same time; enabling the teacher to model each plot point. This is also one of the ways that we differentiate in our English lessons. All English-based activities are extended with opportunities for Greater Depth, where children can take writing in their own directions by ‘Deepening the Moment’. Children are encouraged to choose their own writing lens to showcase their personal stylistic choices and add detail to each moment. Metacognition and self-regulation approaches are used to guide children to think about their own learning more explicitly, by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning.
Skills Development
Y3-Y6 Skills Development
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KS2 writing ladders | [pdf 600KB] |
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