Writing at MJS

Intent

• Ensure that all children have access to a rich and varied, progressive curriculum, that is both challenging and enjoyable.
• Provide the children with a range of writing opportunities that develop and build upon their knowledge of genres and forms, and are for a variety of purposes and audiences.
• Teach specific vocabulary so that the children develop a rich and varied vocabulary and are able to select words for purpose and effect.
• Grammatical conventions and structures will be taught, embedded and applied within independent writing.
• Children will be able to apply the spelling rules and patterns they have been taught and have a range of strategies for checking the accuracy of spellings.
• Children will be able to write legibly, fluently and with increasing speed, and will be able to make decisions about when to join letters, selecting the writing implement most suited to a task.

Whole class teaching: Teaching as a whole class enables children of all abilities to receive and be exposed to high quality teaching, vocabulary and texts. The sharing of ideas enables every child to work towards a common goal.

Marking and Feedback: The most valuable feedback the children receive is at the point of writing. These learning conversations enable misconceptions to be addressed swiftly and immediate feedback to be acted upon. Post lesson marking is completed using the success criteria and celebrates the strengths of the piece and identifies next steps for improvement.

Success Criteria: The school uses success criteria which supports progression across year groups and within purposes for writing.  The children are involved in the production of the document during the writing sequence. The purpose, audience, effect they wish their writing to have, the ingredients required and examples are all identified. Previous learning is retrieved and concepts taught are built-in. This process enables to children to think of themselves as writers and the impact the want to have upon the reader.

Writing Overview: The whole school writing overview ensures that the children experience a range of genres and write for a variety of purposes and audiences, including real-life contexts wherever possible.  This revisiting of writing purposes enables the children to retrieve and build upon previous learning.

Working Walls: Each classroom has a working wall which provides a visual stimulus and resources that the children can refer to during the writing process. These may include: the success criteria, Rainbow Grammar objectives, WAGOLLs and vocabulary.

Rainbow Grammar: Rainbow Grammar is an approach to teaching children how to build different types of sentences and to deliver the key grammatical understanding outlined in the curriculum. Different parts of a sentence are colour coded and cards enable children to construct and manipulate sentences, which are then applied within their independent writing.

Tier 1 – words that are used in everyday speech. These words rarely need teaching. For example, happy, play, walk.

Tier 2 – words that are found in many different contexts. These are high frequency but require an element of teaching. For example, endure, swoop, hesitate.

Tier 3 – subject specific words that will only appear in that context. For example, photosynthesis, cardiovascular, geothermal.

Impact

By the time children leave MJS they will:

• have made good progress from their KS1 results
• have the ability to plan, draft and edit their own work
• be able to write for a range of purposes, selecting and manipulating language and sentence structures appropriate to the audience and form
• be able to communicate effectively in written form
• have the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding to prepare them for accessing  the curriculum at secondary school and beyond.

The impact will be monitored through:

• the tracking of Key Writing Objectives identified for each year group
• regular opportunities for internal and external moderation of writing, which are embedded within assessment cycles
• book looks, learning walks, lesson observations and professional dialogue.