Writing

At London Colney, we provide an appropriate, inclusive, engaging English curriculum. The development of children’s language is crucial to their success across the curriculum. We want all children to be excellent communicators, to listen actively and to speak with confidence. At London Colney, children are helped to develop a love of reading and to become skilful and imaginative writers. During all lessons across the school, children have the opportunity to develop their spoken language capabilities and improve their listening skills through a wide range of activities.

Planning writing is organised around the Teaching Sequence for Writing. This provides a clear learning sequence using a model text (please see core texts on our Reading Page) as the starting point to engage, exemplify and practice skills before progressing into extended writing episodes; this includes opportunities for drafting, editing and publishing writing.

Writing has a high profile in the curriculum and opportunities for writing are frequent and varied. Writing forms a key part of all subjects across the curriculum. All children get the opportunity to write for an extended period of time each week. As well as this, the writing curriculum is such that at times, writing is taught directly to pupils. This includes the teaching of writing and language skills for example technical vocabulary, spelling, grammar and punctuation. As with the reading, writing instruction is differentiated according to the needs of the children. The teaching sequence includes opportunities for several different styles of teaching. These include: modelled writing, shared writing, guided writing, paired writing and individual writing.

Teaching Approaches to Support Writing

Here at London Colney, we have linked our school value of ‘Respect’ to writing in that we believe that at the heart of becoming a confident and fluent writer is to have a deep awareness of purpose and respect for the audience/readers of our writing. We are passionate about developing our

children’s motivation and confidence in the craft of writing through the use the of The ESSENTIALWRITING curriculum which is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme, hooked in with high-quality literature. Our teachers are equipped with the subject knowledge, pedagogical tools and strategies to teach children how to write for specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, children feel inspired and ready to write.

In addition to our sequenced writing curriculum we also use whole school English plans to enrich the children’s love of writing. These plans include published ‘Explore and Engage’ plans as part of our Essential Writing programme as well as very own ‘Enrich’ plans which are designed to incorporate wider curriculum areas of focus into the purpose of writing. These plans include aspects of SMSC, PSHE, Geography, History, anti-racism, British Values, social justice, financial awareness as well as our wider school values. We believe that this provides our children with agency over their writing as they also add their voice and ideas to bespoke the delivery of these plans further.

Coming to England

Money in The Bank (various texts)

Rosie Revere Engineer

Journey

Padding is from Peru. What about you? ( various texts)

And Tango Makes Three

Race Cars

Mixed

Remixed

“Is that true Winnie the Pooh?” (various texts)

Independent Writing

Each week, children have the opportunity to write independently and for an extended period of time. Children will have explored the writing stimulus prior to this lesson during the week and will have prepared for their writing in the lessons prior, including learning/revising a grammatical skill that can be used within their writing. These weekly pieces of independent writing often build towards or aid children’s final piece of writing for a half term, which may often be a re-telling or re-invention of the core text they have read.

During this writing lesson, our teachers use Shared Writing approaches to model and scaffold to their pupils what they writing could look like and how to use the grammar, punctuation and spelling skills they have previously learned. As part of this shared writing, teachers will write a shared piece, taking some contributions from the class before children set to writing their own pieces.

To support their independent writing. children are provided with a writing toolkit / success criteria of what their teacher would like them to try and include in their independent writing. The content of these success criteria will look different across year groups based on the subject content they need to deliver for their year group. These success criteria may also look different for pupils in each class as we differentiate them based on the level and needs of each child. A typical success criteria would look as follows:

Our pupils would use these success criteria within their independent writing lesson to support their composition. They also use these to help evaluate their writing during their editing lessons.

Editing

We know that when authors write their books, very rarely would they get it perfect first time, relying on the editing process to look at what has gone well and what can be further improved. It is no different here at London Colney for our children whenever they have completed their independent, extended writing. We appreciate the importance of developing children who are able to reflect upon, evaluate and edit their pieces of writing so that they can understand what works well and what can be further improved. Because of this, we devote a whole lesson to editing so that our pupils have the time to further explore their writing.

Our editing lesson and process is first and foremost built around positivity and praise, with children identifying and knowing what they have done well so that they feel empowered and inspired to continue to write. Our editing process follows a clear structure which is taught to children in our discrete editing lessons so that as they move through the school, their ability to edit well is developed. Our editing process follows these 4 steps in every editing lesson:

Find Some Fantastic – To start our editing process, children must first of all read back through their work and identify the parts that they feel are fantastic. This could be a word, phrase, sentence or whole section of their writing. Children are encouraged to not only find the part/s that they feel are fantastic, they are also ask to justify why. This may be because they have used an effective piece of vocabulary, have used something from their success criteria, have challenged themselves to include something they haven’t been asked to use or just because they like how it sounds and think it will have a desired impact on the reader. This is then recorded in books.

Prove it to my Partner – Here, children work with a partner/s to clearly identify what they have used successfully. Looking at one book at a time, children use their success criteria to find in their writing the elements they have been asked to use, highlighting these and marking in our margin what skill they have used (we like our pupils to use each thing 2 or 3 times before they say they have used it successfully). Children are supported to understand that it is ok if they do not find everything or haven’t used something enough – they can add this when up-skilling.

Up, Up, Up-skill – At this point, children have the opportunity to make their writing even better. For some of our youngest children, this may be going back and improving word choices so that they are even more effective. For our older children, this would include identify and up-skilling sections of their writing. It may be a case of adding in something further from the success criteria or that they don’t like how it reads or the impact it has on the reader. Children may use slips of paper and stick them over the original so that they can show how they have improved it.

Power to the Proofread – This last step is around proofreading and any last corrections. Here, children have one last read and look for words they have spelt wrong, incorrect or missing punctuation or sentences that don’t make sense.

Writing

• Writing-Skills-Progression-london-colney.pdf (722.12KB)

Planning writing is organised around the Teaching Sequence for Writing. This provides a clear learning sequence using a model text as the starting point to engage, exemplify and practice skills before progressing into extended writing episodes; this includes opportunities for drafting, editing and publishing writing.

Writing has a high profile in the curriculum and opportunities for writing are frequent and varied. Writing forms a key part of all subjects across the curriculum. All children get the opportunity to write for an extended period of time each week. As well as this, the writing curriculum is such that at times, writing is taught directly to pupils. This includes the teaching of writing and language skills for example technical vocabulary, spelling, grammar and punctuation. As with the reading, writing instruction is differentiated according to the needs of the children.

The teaching sequence includes opportunities for several different styles of teaching.
These include: modelled writing, shared writing, guided writing, paired writing and individual writing.

Spelling

At London Colney, we use Essential Spelling as our spelling programme. Once children have completed our phonics programme, children then transition into the spelling programme, which starts at a Y2 level through to a Y6 level.