Intent

At Valley Road, enabling children to become confident, compelling and purposeful writers is something we value greatly.  We focus on children being able to use the knowledge they learn, to produce purposeful, well-crafted, creative and informative written work.  By the time they leave Valley Road, children will understand that writing is a craft which is developed through repeated practice in order to improve.

We want our children to be part of a community of writers and authors and provide them with many different experiences so that they are ‘hooked in’ and inspired to write.

We want to develop writers who:

• develop a life-long stamina and love for writing throughout the school.
• are immersed in a variety of genres and have a clear understanding of text types and their purpose.
• have a clear understanding of purpose.
• have an understanding of intended impact of writing skills and tools.
• have the ability to carefully select vocabulary with careful attention to the desired effect on the readers’ thoughts and feelings.
• Understand how to plan, draft, improve and edit their work so it can be the best it can be and achieve the desired effect.
• Are able to use and create their own success-criteria.
• Use resources independently to support their writing.
• Use their reading and word collections.

Article 29

I have the right to an education which develops my personality,

talents and abilities

Implementation

Children are encouraged to view writing as a writing journey. The expectation of what children should include within their work is planned for, in long and medium term plans, based on NC expectations for each year group.

An English journey is planned for each genre taught and is divided into these sections usually over a 2 to 3-week period:

• Immersion into high-quality texts to identify & define features
• Identify the audience, purpose and style of writing
• Practice of skills-Word and Sentence Level work (including Alan Peat)
• Modelled and Shared Writing
• Planning, Drafting, Editing and Publishing a written piece of writing

An emphasis is placed upon building skills and vocabulary, and developing stamina to produce high-quality writing. Children learn the main rules and conventions of written English at word and sentence level. we explicitly teach children a range of sentence structures, based on Alan Peat’s ‘Writing Exciting Sentences’. Punctuation and Grammar is taught and re-visited during  'Warm-up with Words' at the start of each lesson. Children also learn how the English language can be used to express meaning in different ways. 

Impact

The intended impact is that all pupils will have the knowledge and skills to be able to write successfully for a range of purposes and audiences and that pupils of all abilities will be able to succeed in English lessons because learning will be appropriately scaffolded and challenging.

By the end of Key Stage 2, children will have developed a writer’s craft, will have stamina for sustained writing and understand how language, grammar and punctuation can be manipulated for effect.

We measure the impact of our teaching through regular assessment (both formal and informal) as well as internal and external moderation.

 Click   to access Alan Peat's Exciting Sentences.

  Click       to access Progression in Text Types.