Writing
In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality texts – from picture books to Shakespeare, immersive real-life experiences, such as school trips, or a combination of both. Over their time at the school, children will write various fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays, and stories. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing.
Get It Write
We have created a structure to the sequence of writing units we call Get It Write, which enables all children to access high-quality reading and examples of writing, build understanding and pull out grammatical features and good examples of language before applying those skills to writing their high-quality texts. Each unit follows the three following stages:
Stimulate and Generate
In this stage, children read high-quality books to build knowledge on the subject. These books link to our wider topic, shown below. They also analyse high-quality examples of the text type to pull apart features of the text, the types of language used, and examine who might read these texts and why they might want to read them.
Through active drama, questioning or debate sessions, children develop their inference skills and are hooked into the topic to develop empathy with the characters or the events. Children also apply their understanding of previous learning to write texts in other genres based on the current topic, revisiting past learning and deepening their thinking. This ensures children are fully immersed in the writing process and thoroughly understand the topic and the text.
Capture, Sift and Sort
Within this stage, children learn explicit skills within the context of the writing, manipulating the language they have learned and applying it in different contexts in the topic. They are modelled, share writing, and learn different ways of producing effective sentences within the genre they are studying. They are critical of writing: reading and thinking as a writer to improve sentences and paragraphs.
Children also plan for their own unique pieces of writing in the genre based on the same topic. Children begin to apply the skills they have learnt throughout the unit to consider how to write the most effective text, thinking about the reader and how they can achieve the genre benchmarks in the highest quality possible.
Create, Refine, Evaluate
In the last stage of the unit, children have time to apply these skills to create a sustained writing outcome through an independent application of the genre, form and the author's voice. They follow their plan to complete their text before refining and drafting their work through proofreading and editing. Then, all pupils complete their work in display-quality final editions.
Finally, children evaluate their and others' work, examining how they meet the agreed success criteria and reflecting on their work for the future.
English Text Drivers
We use high-quality texts in every unit every year to ensure children are immersed in the topic and the genre of writing they are producing. Each year group studies one or two books per term linked closely with what children are studying in History and Geography. In addition, children will be reading books in Guided Reading classes daily; these will usually be linked to the knowledge needed to thrive in English lessons.
Click here to find out about our Reading provision