Subject Intent
At North Town Primary School and Nursery, we strive to help our children develop into articulate and imaginative communicators, who are well-equipped with the skills they need to become life-long learners. Learning to write is key in this. We aim to ensure that children develop an understanding of how widely writing is used in everyday life and, therefore, how important and useful the skills are that they are learning, that all of our children develop a genuine love of language and the written word and that when they are writing they see it as relevant and meaningful. Our intentions in Writing are for all of our children to:
- Always write for a purpose
- See themselves as real writers
- Take ownership of their writing
- See writing as an interesting and enjoyable process.
The Write Stuff
At North Town Primary School, we use the scheme The Write Stuff to develop the teaching and learning of writing. Within this scheme, the children learn to learn a range of non-fiction and fiction texts. The scheme aims to build pupils’ confidence with sentence structure, widen the repertoire of writing options for pupils, help pupils gain an understanding of the ‘whole’ piece that they are writing and help them to organise their ideas more effectively. Each unit of work will be made up of experience lessons and sentence stacking lessons, before children plan and write their own independent piece of writing.
During the experience lessons, pupils will gather ideas based on a varied range of activities linked to their genre and topic of writing. Experience lessons can take many forms – visits out, visitors in or drama conventions deployed to strengthen context and build imagination.
Each sentence stacking lesson is based around a ‘plot point’ for a narrative, or part of the ‘shape’ for non-fiction genres. Sentence stacking lessons will be made up of three learning chunks, including the initiate stage. Here, teachers share a stimulus, for example, a film clip, picture or a drama activity. The pupils then ‘chot’ (chat and jot) vocabulary relating to the stimulus in their books. The teacher then clearly models writing, explicitly explaining their choice of words that have been gathered in the ‘chotting’ stage. Finally, during the enable stage, the pupils write their sentences sticking to the clear criteria. The pupils have their ‘chottings’ to support their word choices.
Pupils then plan, write and edit an independent piece where success criteria are shared, and they have the chance to demonstrate the skills and knowledge about sentences and genre they have learnt. During the Independent write, children then edit and amend their writing, both using self and peer assessment activities.
Handwriting
At North Town Primary School, the handwriting programme we use and teach is Nelson Handwriting. Nelson Handwriting is a whole-school programme designed to help all children develop a confident, legible and personal handwriting style and meet higher curriculum expectations.
In EYFS, children are supported from the earliest stages of learning to write. Children are taught letter formation in conjunction with their daily RWI Phonics programme. A clear focus on posture, pencil grip, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination is planned for and provided within these lessons and the wider curriculum.
In Year 1, conditions are clearly set and created for good writing, as well as continuing to develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. All of the lower-case and capital letters are covered with clear and consistent instructions about how to start and finish letters and the digits 0-9 are clearly taught.
In Year 2, children revise the previously learned joins with an emphasis on relative height. Children recap their learning of lower-case and capital letters. Children are also given the opportunity to continue to practise using print letters and are reminded that some letters are best left unjoined.In Years 3 and 4, children continue to practise and develop their handwriting skills. Pupils are provided with practice in joining using diagonal and horizontal strokes as well as the ‘break letters’ that are best left unjoined. There is an emphasis on spacing letters consistently and on keeping ascenders and descenders in proportion.
In Years 5-6, Nelson Handwriting continues to provide structured practice for the skills that have been developed so far. Children continue to practise the joins and the break letters, looking at consistency of sizing and spacing. We empower children to develop their own style of handwriting from a secure base, choosing their writing implement and style as appropriate to the occasion.
Spelling
In Key Stage 2, we use the resource Spelling Shed which maps out the spellings taught in each year group and offers a common approach for each unit and across year groups. It includes the high frequency words and the statutory words for Y3-6. Through this scheme, in spelling lessons, students continue to build on the firm foundations built whilst studying phonics in Reception and Key Stage 1. They will continue to break spellings down into the smallest units of sound and cluster them into syllables in order to read and write words efficiently. Children will also study words; word parts; their meanings and how this affects spelling (morphology). Their knowledge of common morphemes such as root formations, prefixes and suffixes is consolidated across the programme.
Photos from our Vocabulary Day held on Thursday 12th January 2023
