Writing at Queen Victoria Primary School
Intent
At Queen Victoria, it is our intent to inspire our children with high-quality literature and a range of stimuli, which makes readers engage with and enjoy writing. We ensure the children write for a variety of purposes and apply progressively more complex skills to communicate ideas fluently and with interesting detail throughout a range of genres. Writing is well organised and structured, which includes a variety of sentence structures. Throughout the writing process, our children will edit and redraft their work, responding to feedback from teachers and peers.
Implementation
We have adopted ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to our teaching and learning of English to ensure clarity to the mechanics of writing. Following a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’, the approach places emphasis on sentences being ‘stacked together’ chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. Within each genre studied by the children, they will learn to sentence stack, focusing on the style of the author and impact of words and sentences most appropriate for that particular genre. All genres covered within writing sessions are those as taken from the Genre Overview on our Year Group Writing Progression Documents.
Within each writing lesson, pupils learning is ‘chunked’ into three distinct parts for a writing lesson; initiate, model, enable. The initiate stage is a time to inspire using a stimulus; pupils are immersed in a rich language discussion and activities to provide a wealth of vocabulary to aid their writing. The model stage is the chunk whereby the teacher demonstrates the thoughts and processes of a writer and articulates writing choices. The enable stage is the opportunity for pupils to showcase what they can do within particular writing parameters known as The Three Zones of Writing: FANTASTICs, GRAMMARISTICs and the BOOMTASTICs.
The Three Zones of Writing are essential components to support pupils in becoming great writers. Through the nine idea lenses known as the FANTASTICs, pupils focus on intended purpose of a sentence. The GRAMMARISTICs allow pupils to focus on the grammar element of writing which focuses on sentence structure, grammar rules and punctuation. The BOOMTASTICs allow pupils to capture and create a vivid visual for the reader through the use of poetic devices. Throughout the writing process, children edit and redraft their work in response to feedback from their teacher and peers.
Impact
Our writing curriculum facilitates sequential learning and long-term progression of knowledge and skills. Teaching and learning methods provide regular opportunities to recap acquired knowledge through high quality questioning, discussion, modelling and explaining to aid retrieval. Regular practice of skills will provide children with the confidence to apply these in a range of independent situations whereby they have the chance to show what they have learnt. The range of writing situations we provide will enable all children to remember more and be able to do more as writers.