Writing

Intent

At Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy, we believe that all children have the potential to become great writers. Being able to communicate ideas, thoughts and feelings through the written word is a life skill and we aim to inspire our children to love and appreciate the power of writing. As we recognise the interrelated nature of literacy skills, high-quality fiction is central to our provision for both reading and writing, and high-quality modelling is a central tenet of every writing lesson.

Aims

Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy aims to ensure a consistent approach to teaching writing rooted in the principles of sentence-stacking and a mastery approach to learning.

Our aims can be summarised as follows:

• For all children to develop a love of writing.
• For all children to become accomplished in knowing how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. 
• For children to be confident to explore and experiment with sentence structure and vocabulary so that their writing shows flair and creativity.
• For children to know how to use punctuation and grammar to control their sentences and structure their writing. 
• For children to develop a rich vocabulary which they can apply appropriately.
• For children to have the skills and knowledge to make educated attempts at spelling new words that they meet.
• For children to know how to spell high-frequency words that don’t follow normal spelling patterns.
• For children to know how to edit and improve their writing in order to improve its quality.
• For children to develop a fluent and neat cursive style of handwriting.

Implementation

At Wilshere-Dacre, we teach a mastery approach to writing through “sentence stacking” which is a structured modelling of the writing process.

• All units of writing start with a high-quality text that the children read and analyse to identify the features of a particular genre of writing. This includes types of sentence and grammatical features as well as vocabulary choices.
• When they start the writing process, the children will first be given a chance to collect and gather their ideas for the chunk that they will be writing (the initiate stage). Each sentence is then modelled by the teacher (the model stage). The children will then write their own sentence chunk, applying what they have been taught (the enable stage).
• Where possible, feedback to individual children will be immediate and targeted on specific areas of improvement. Children can then respond immediately to the feedback that they have received.
• The children will be taught grammar through the modelled sentence approach so that they learn to embed it into a context but will also receive discrete grammatical instruction through daily grammar starters, predominantly focused on learning from previous year groups.
• The children will see visual maps of what different text types look like to help them when they are writing independently.
• Each unit of work will end with a Hot Task, where children have the opportunity to write an independent piece within the same genre.
• The children will have opportunities to write for real life purposes and to publish their work.
• Spelling is taught discretely through the Spelling Shed scheme of work and handwriting is similarly taught discretely through the Letterjoin scheme of work.

Impact

Each stage of a child’s writing journey, from Key Stage 1 through to the end of Key Stage 2, progressively builds on the skills they have previously learned, with the foundations of sentence structure laid in Key Stage 1 enabling children to develop their use of punctuation, clause structures, sentence types and conscious control of language choices as they progress through Key Stage 2. Termly summative assessments allow teachers to measure the progress pupils are making and expose any barriers to continuing this learning journey that can be supported through both first quality teaching and interventions. In addition, writing moderations, both internally and externally with other schools, happen frequently to ensure consistency of judgements across the school.

I love writing stories and getting lost in the worlds I create. - Year 4 pupil.

Writing gives me the opportunity to unleash my creativity! - Year 5 pupil.