Curriculum: Writing

Our Vision

At Lainesmead Primary School and Nursery, we aim to inspire confident, creative and independent writers who see themselves as authors. Through a clear progression of skills, children learn to reflect, edit and build upon their writing to produce purposeful, independent pieces for a range of audiences. Writing is made meaningful and enjoyable through drama, performance and publishing opportunities that celebrate children’s voices and link closely with oracy. By writing for real purposes, pupils develop the confidence and a toolkit of skills to succeed as writers in the wider world.

How we teach Writing at Lainesmead Primary School and Nursery

At Lainesmead Primary School and Nursery, books are at the heart of our learning and used as the basis for our lessons. This book is carefully selected to take into account the class topic and the age and appropriateness for the children. Opportunities will be planned for children to deepen their knowledge of these texts through a range of activities designed to provide children with effective vocabulary and the knowledge of structure and grammar to write clear and organised fiction and non-fiction texts that have an inspiring purpose for writing and engaging audience.

We ensure our writing opportunities link to Michael Tidd's purposes for writing to help our pupils understand why they are writing and how to adapt their style for different contexts.

Find out more about Michael Tidd's purposes for writing here:

Find out more about the purposes for writing your child completes here:

The Lainesmead Writing Process guides pupils through each stage of creating a piece of writing.  We begin each sequence of teaching by encouraging a love of learning, and sparking the children's interest into the writing by exploring ideas linked to the purpose and audience of our writing through drama and book talk.

We write a reflective piece linked to the child's interests, giving them the opportunity to showcase their existing knowledge.  Children are taught explicit writing skills appropriate for the text type that they are writing, and the reflective piece is used to build these skills into writing in order to develop their tool kit for writing.

Pupils plan, write and edit their independent application of the newly taught skills.  Pupils are given opportunities to either publish or perform their writing.  Throughout the process, teachers use the visualisers to model their live thinking and set high expectations for writing.

Target Getting

To fill any gaps in children’s writing, all children are given a personal Writing Target. To help them to achieve this target, they will receive target getting sessions with their teacher once a fortnight. Teachers assess when a child is ready to move on to a new target through regular assessment of writing and when marking children’s independent pieces of writing.

Vocabulary

Children will also be exposed to and explicitly taught new vocabulary in the form of ‘WOW words’ each week as part of their English lesson. These words will be carefully chosen from their book or will be words that they can use when talking and writing about themes in the book. They will be given the opportunity to learn and explore these words in a range of contexts and be provided the chance to use them in their own writing.

Here is an example of a Key Stage 2 work mat referred to in daily English lessons: