It is our intent at Grove Lea Primary School to follow the National Curriculum requirements to provide pupils with a high-quality education in English that will teach pupils to speak, read and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others effectively.
At School, writing is an integral part of our curriculum. All children from Foundation Stage to Year 6 are provided with many opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum. We intend for pupils to develop an understanding of the writing process through giving opportunities for the children to explore a variety of genres, plan, draft and re-draft their writing. It is our intention to broaden our pupils’ exposure to high – level tier vocabulary to allow pupils to apply their understanding of vocabulary and grammatical features within and across the English curriculum. To be able to do this effectively, pupils will focus on developing effective transcription and effective composition. We also intend for pupils to leave school being able to use fluent, legible handwriting.
With regards to Spelling, we intend that pupils learn how to understand the relationships between words, word meaning, implied meaning and figurative language within writing lessons, whilst ensuring that children are supported in their spelling strategies. Pupils will be taught to control their speaking and writing consciously and to use Standard English.
Literacy is taught through a daily timetabled session. The planning for teaching a unit of Literacy will therefore, take in to account the strands appropriate to the unit and will follow the suggested breakdown into phases that come from the long term plan. Units of work for each year group are delivered either discretely or through cross curricular links. At Grove Lea Primary, children are given frequent and wide-ranging writing opportunities. Children from Foundation Stage to Year 6 are given opportunities to write, and the links between reading and writing are made explicit. Children are made aware of the importance of planning their writing. In the Foundation Stage this may be telling the teacher what they are going to write, whilst in years 1 – 6 it may involve a planning grid and/or draft copy. From the minute they join our school in Foundation Stage, children are encouraged to use writing materials and experiment with mark making. As they gain any phonic knowledge they apply this to write freely, gradually developing from being emergent writers. The children also see writing modelled by the teacher in Shared Writing sessions and phonics lessons. By the end of Reception, most children should be confident in all of the alphabet sounds and be using this knowledge to begin to spell simple words and write basic sentences. In Year 1, children use their phonic knowledge to write simple sentences. By Year 2, children are extending their own writing and considering their audience.
Pupil outcomes are assessed across independent pieces of writing, during termly assessment periods. To ensure that children receive teaching in response to needs and all make progress, leaders work alongside teachers to ensure that the writing opportunities and outcomes are appropriate for the needs of all the children in their year group. By the end of each Key Stage, we aim for children’s outcomes to be in line with age related expectations and their writing should demonstrate the appropriate grammatical and language features for their age.
Children’s choice of vocabulary and sentence construction should improve in their writing across all areas of the curriculum. We also aim for a higher percentage of children to attain greater depth in writing in all year groups in accordance with our objectives from our school development plan.
We aim for the children to articulate their love of writing and foster their own learning through dedicated pupil voice enabling writing to occur naturally throughout the day and in a wide range of contexts. This will give them a solid foundation to move into the next year group or stage of their educational journey.
