We have learnt that children attending our school generally have grown up with limited access to storytelling, literature and opportunities to talk and widen their vocabulary. The writing curriculum here at Madron Daniel is designed to provide children with those learning experiences. Structured progression in knowledge from the teaching of phonetic spelling and handwriting to sentence construction and knowledge of genre characteristics are all carefully planned. We have researched, tried, tested, adapted our approaches over many years.
We teach children the purpose of writing and the importance of these lifelong skills using well-conceived and engaging literacy outcomes in the classroom. We connect literacy with the wider curriculum to strengthen pupil memory. To improve reduced speech and language skills in the community, we spend time modelling, directly teaching and rehearsing vocabulary and word meaning. To ensure that pupils understand the value of literacy skills and build positive attitudes towards this area of their learning, we introduce literacy units in fun and imaginative ways using various experiences and visits to hook in every child.
We use high-quality texts to support our pupils to learn to write in a creative and imaginative way, without losing the emphasis on accurate writing. This approach supports children to become confident writers who can express their thoughts and ideas accurately through a range of genres for a variety of different purposes. We also teach them how to present their writing clearly, neatly and precisely for different audiences.|
Implementation |
|
|
Teaching principles |
Teaching approaches |
|
|
• Take part in experiences that enable them to write with confidence.
• Acquire a positive attitude towards literacy.
• Develop their writing stamina to be able to write longer pieces of text and for different audiences.
• Understand the difference between independent, guided and shared writing to be able to compose, edit and revise their writing.
• Check their work for accuracy, meaning and sense.
• Understand the grammatical needs to each genre.
• Understand the different sentence types used in each genre and use them with confidence.
• Provide differentiated learning to ensure that all children can write for a purpose, providing resources to support them.
• Organise and present their work according to the genre being taught.
• Use a range of strategies for spelling
