Writing
Intent
At Manor Drive Primary Academy, we aim to inspire a love of reading, writing, and discussion by engaging children with high-quality, diverse texts that reflect their cultures, families and relationships. Our use of the Literacy Tree Curriculum ensures exposure to a wide range of books, offering meaningful learning experiences that motivate children to write for real purposes - whether to explain, persuade, inform, or entertain.
Our English curriculum is designed to develop spoken language skills through debate, drama, and discussion rooted in the issues raised by these texts. We believe that excitement about literature is essential for all children to thrive and reach their full potential.
We aim to equip all children with a secure understanding of English, enabling them to communicate confidently in both speech and writing. English is at the core of all learning, fostering intellectual, emotional, and social development. Through our progressive curriculum and regular assessment, we ensure every child develops into a confident, capable, and independent writer who understands the importance of writing and enjoys the process.
Our aims are to:
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Build a progressive curriculum with regular assessments to support individual progress.
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Ensure all children master phonics as a foundation for fluent writing.
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Link reading and writing objectives to high-quality, purposeful texts.
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Promote spoken language development through drama, debate, and discussion.
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Provide stimulating writing opportunities to engage and inspire all learners.
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Teach clear, accurate, and audience-appropriate writing across a variety of contexts and purposes.
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Develop a solid understanding of grammar and spelling patterns for application in writing.
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Cultivate pride in presentation with a legible, joined handwriting style by Key Stage 3.
Implementation
We ensure daily writing across all subjects. In English, writing is taught across a three to four weekly cycle in which high quality texts are linked to our ‘Teach through text approach’ following the Literacy Tree Curriculum. These stimulating books, including a range of diversity ones, are used as provocations to produce a range of fiction and non-fiction writing genres, e.g. narrative, poetry, reports, persuasion etc . Skills for writing are embedded sequentially by following the Literacy Tree Curriculum where modelling, drafting and editing scaffold learning. At all stages, teachers explicitly model the process of writing and editing, so pupils can see in real time the effort required to craft quality work. Pupils are taught to use appropriate punctuation and grammar implicitly and explicitly-depending on the genre. Opportunities for pupils to apply their writing are planned for, based around the texts that are being covered over the three-four week periods. Quality, diversity and engaging texts are used as a catalyst for strong writing outcomes, which sees all teachers explicit the process of writing. Pupils build on the punctuation and grammar they learnt in KS1- learning to use them to create literary effects. In KS2, pupils have multiple opportunities to write for purpose; to entertain, to manipulate the reader, inspire, entertain, persuade, discuss and inform.
Within each unit of work within English, children will:
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Have opportunities to participate in drama & spoken language activities.
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Explore the features of different types of texts and modelled examples.
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Practise and improve their handwriting.
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Use relevant strategies to widen their vocabulary, including technical vocabulary.
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Experience shared and modelled writing.
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Be taught lessons in spelling, grammar and punctuation, within English lessons.
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Plan, draft, edit and up-level their writing.
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Write independently and present their writing for an audience.
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Perform or read their work to their peers or an audience.
Handwriting:
It is a key skill for all children to be able to write using a joined, personal style by the end of Key Stage 2. Children are taught the importance of correct body posture, how to hold a pen/pencil correctly and the importance of producing a piece of work in an attractive manner.
During their time in EYFS, children start learning to write through a wide variety of opportunities to mark make and give meaning to marks. Children are then taught to produce identifiable letters with the correct size and letter formation. By the end of EYFS, most children will be able to think of and write a simple sentence using letters which are mostly formed correctly and can be read by others. In Year One to Year Six, children are taught handwriting regularly and progressively. We use a scheme of work throughout school that underpins the expectations of handwriting and letter formation.
Impact
We want children to leave Manor Drive Primary Academy as confident writers, with the knowledge and understanding of all aspects of writing.
As a school, we measure the impact of our writing curriculum through:
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Ensuring that the National Curriculum requirements are met in each year group.
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Using summative assessment five times per year to measure children’s understanding, progress and identify their next steps (set targets)
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Regular moderation both internally and externally to support teacher judgements.
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Carrying out deep dives, where evidence is gathered through book scrutiny, pupil voice and discussions with staff.
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Feedback of children’s work in books, which can be both verbal or written.
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The writing lead’s identification of next steps, which are determined by a cycle of monitoring, evaluating and reviewing.
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Monitoring of children’s progress from year to year, ensuring our children are making good progress from their starting points.