At Half Acres Primary Academy, it is our intention to provide pupils with a high quality Education in writing that will develop pupils’ ability to communicate, master the mechanics and develop an interest in writing that will aid their communication of thoughts, ideas and emotions effectively.
All children from Foundation Stage to Year 6 are provided with a wide range of opportunities to promote, develop and apply their writing skills across the wider curriculum. It is our intention that pupils acquire the necessary skills and develop a clear understanding of the writing sequence in order to establish themselves as a competent and capable writer. Through our writing curriculum, books or texts are selected prudently in order to foster pupils’ interest in the written word creating a reason and context for writing, which enables the children to write for purpose and audience. In order to establish this, children will be taken through a writing sequence, which develops their knowledge and skills in writing for context and purpose and allows the opportunities for the children to explore a variety of genres, language and effective composition through planning, drafting, writing and editing. It is our intention to broaden our pupils’ exposure to tiered vocabulary with opportunities to apply their understanding of vocabulary and grammatical features within and across the curriculum.
We intend that pupils learn how to understand the relationships between words, nuances in meaning and develop the understanding and ability to use figurative language. By the time the children leave Half Acres, we intend that pupils will be able to demonstrate fluent, legible and speedy handwriting and have developed a bank of spelling strategies that will support beyond education. We intend that pupils will be taught to control their speaking and writing consciously and to use correct Standard English.
Our writing curriculum is derived around a sequence and range of high quality, age appropriate texts. We use each book or text to create opportunities to develop grammar and punctuation knowledge and understanding to use and apply across the wider curriculum, explore the writing structure and features of different genres, identify the purpose and audience, plan and write a piece of writing with a clear context and purpose before evaluating the effectiveness of writing through editing and redrafting. To ensure children know more and remember more, careful and progressive planning is conducted to guarantee learning is built on previously taught skills in order to create confident and successful writers.
At Half Acres, we believe that writing is supported and strengthened by instilling a love for reading within our pupils. We value the significance of reading to supplement writing, providing a purpose and a context. We believe that pupils who are given the opportunities to identify reasons for writing demonstrate panache, finesse and effective writing composition, leading to high quality outcomes. Every half term, the writing curriculum is taught through the exploration of a high quality text. From this element of the curriculum, pupils are taught the grammar from the National Curriculum which is taught to correspond to the genres being written as part of the writing process. Children are then supported in how to apply the grammatical content taught in identifying features of a high quality modelled text, before progressing to plan, write and re-draft a written piece which is fit for purpose and audience.
We strive to ensure that we provide our pupils with a ‘language rich’ environment; we do this within our classrooms where we explore ambitious vocabulary through our use of working walls, washing lines and knowledge organisers. We link our vocabulary across the wider curriculum to ensure we acquire an understanding of high tiered language across the wider curriculum. We firmly believe that at Half Acres, if we expose children to high quality vocabulary, this has a significant impact on pupils’ ability to become effective writers and develop their own, individualised style of writing.
We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment is in line or exceeds their individual potential when we consider the varied starting points of all our children. We measure this across independent pieces of writing within writing and cross-curricular, where we strive to ensure children will be able to produce written work in all areas of the curriculum of a similar standard which show good progress, whilst always considering the expectations for each year group. Children will make at least good progress in writing from their last point of statutory assessment or from their baseline in Nursery. We intend the impact of our writing curriculum will ensure our pupils have acquired the necessary skills in preparation for life beyond primary school and throughout their continued educational journey.
At Half Acres Primary Academy, our values are at the heart of all we do: within our teaching of writing, we strive to provide opportunities for pupils to develop their own core values whilst instilling the Fundamental British Values in many opportunities within a varied range of genres and the book led choices made. Here are some examples of how we consolidate our pupils’ understanding of British Values hand in hand with our own writing curriculum:
New Curriculum Spelling List Years 3 and 4
New Curriculum Spelling List Years 5 and 6
