“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” by Beatrix Potter

Intent

At Springfield, our intent is to provide children with an engaging experience so that they can develop knowledge about a theme before embarking on the writing journey. We believe that children write effectively when they can draw on an experience, using their imagination and having rehearsed and been exposed to key vocabulary.

Implementation

We carefully plan writing experiences for children across different writing genres and through our broad, exciting curriculum. The writing journey begins when children engage in an experience to develop their ideas, imagination and grow their bank of vocabulary. Children are then exposed to a range of WAGOLLs (what a good one looks like) where the features of the genre are identified, and the purpose of the genre highlighted. Exposure to a wide range of vocabulary is crucial, and so this continues to be a focus throughout topic and English lessons in the build up to a piece of writing. Children then begin to chunk their writing with a particular focus in each English lesson linked to the Curriculum for each specific year group. During their core skills English session, teaching adults model the writing process, demonstrating the act of writing alongside the children and articulating the thought process they are going through and how to overcome difficulties they are facing. Once children have written their first draft of writing, they then have opportunities to edit and improve their writing creating more drafts of the same piece.

At Springfield, we take pride in the presentation of our written work and enjoy publishing our writing in creative ways. We celebrate our ideas and feel proud to share these around school.

In Early Years, children begin to form letters through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme, learning rhymes for each grapheme taught. As children move through the school, we continue to teach handwriting in letter families and use bubble writing to support children with letter formation. Children can earn their pen licence, meeting a set of criteria developed from the English National Curriculum. Once they have earned their licence, children can use a pen when completing all written work.

Impact

Children will become independent writers who are able to write a range of genres for different purposes, and for different audiences. They will be confident to navigate the writing process, recalling on personal experiences and using their vast bank of vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and grammar skills to produce a written piece. They will show pride in their writing, thinking carefully about how they can publish their work.