English Writing
'Let us remember: one book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world.'
Malala Yousafzai
Intent
Dundale Primary School and Nursery recognises the significance of learning to write. When children write, they simultaneously pull together a number of different skills including transcription (spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting) and composition (creating a text and articulating ideas). Our aim at Dundale is to equip children with these necessary skills to become confident and independent writers all whilst fostering a love and enjoyment for writing.
Our Dundale values underpin our writing lessons. We ensure the children learn the key skills and knowledge to write for different genres and purposes. We encourage the children to be reflective and explore how to improve their writing to ensure progress. We have high expectations for all therefore foster ambition when writing and celebrate our successes.
Implementation
At Dundale, we follow the Talk for Writing approach developed by Pie Corbett. It is based on the principles of how children learn and enables children to read and write independently. It has three key principles of imitation, innovation and independence. It enables children to imitate orally the language they need in order to write, before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version. Furthermore, this sequence of learning is multisensory allowing our lessons to be engaging, educational and enjoyable.
Teachers follow the Dundale yearly overview, which contains the core list of high-quality texts including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Teachers use these texts as inspiration and follow the Talk for Writing sequence to map out each unit of work. A high standard for handwriting and presentation is modelled across the school and teachers embed previous learning, such as our ELS phonics scheme, when teaching letter formation and handwriting. The children’s spelling is developed using the Essential Spelling programme. Handwriting and spelling is taught and practised discretely in separate books but is expected to be evident in all work.
Using this consistent approach across the whole school develops the children’s ability to grow from dependent to independent, successful writers.
Intended Impact
During the children’s learning journey at Dundale our intended impact of the English writing curriculum is to ensure that children;
- have a love for writing and enjoy writing to articulate their own ideas
- are successful writers in every lesson with support from models and scaffolds
- have the knowledge and skills to write confidently and independently across a range of genres and for different audiences
- consistently form letters and joins correctly and effectively apply different spelling rules
Key Documents