English at Orchard Meadow - Writing

Our Intent

Our values – Ambition, Respect, Determination, Confidence and Enthusiasm – underpin our English curriculum.
Our children will receive a rich coverage of genres across an academic year, with many opportunities to review and apply learnt skills.
Each unit is based around diverse and high-quality core texts to develop and nurture our children’s love of reading and links to written English. These will provide strong models that exemplify the use of vocabulary and structure for communication across many genres.
Through the immersion of texts, our children will learn how to write for a range of purposes, audiences and intents, to reinforce the relevance of writing in their everyday lives.
Through our learning sequences, our children will learn the skills needed to write as a reader, including those for accuracy (transcription) and impact (composition). Essentially, this will include awareness of the end product and appropriate stepping-stones planned in order to achieve this.
Our writers will be active participants at every stage in The Writing Process (detail below).
At the end of a unit, our writers will celebrate their end product, ending with opportunities to share with the intended readership.

Click here for the English - Writing Overview document.

Implementing our vision

The Writing Process

Content

The content for every half term consists of at least one narrative, non-fiction and poetry unit. This is to ensure broad coverage and opportunities to review and revisit skills, as well as progression of skills over the academic year.

The 5Cs documents for each unit clearly set out the aim/ end product and curriculum coverage for the unit and a suggested learning journey. We recognise that individual teachers will use their professional judgement to alter the sequence depending on the needs of our developing writers.

Pedagogy

Every day, we deliver an hour-long English session, which has clear learning outcomes, steps to success, modelling and scaffolds for learning based on the Rosenshine Principles of Instruction.

See the Teaching & Learning section of our website for more information.

Key Stage 1

In Reception and Years 1 and 2, the children follow the Read Write Inc programme of study. This is a rigorous, highly structured programme, including the teaching of core skills in reading and writing in small steps, whilst reducing cognitive load. The coverage during these years provide the vital pre-requisite skills that the children need for learning in KS2.

For more information about the Read Write Inc. phonics programme please see the Phonics section of this website.

Key Stage 2

In KS2, our children are taught spelling (based on The National Curriculum) and handwriting regularly to develop transcriptional skills.

Assessment

For each year group, there is a Core Skills Assessment Tracker that allows our teachers to identify the progress of our writers over the academic year. These contain progressive skills that prepare our children to write at the Age-Related Expected standard at Year 2 and 6, which denote expectations from the National Frameworks.

Over time, teachers use these documents to identify common and individual gaps to plan into the learning journey. At each assessment point, our children are assessed as being either Below, Working Towards, Expected or Greater Depth, depending on which skills have been learnt.

For each unit, there is a Success Criteria that denotes skills to be demonstrated for ARE (MUST) and Greater Depth (COULD) writers. Through the year, these skills turn green, indicating that these are skills being reviewed and new learning is denoted in black.

Writing Assessment (Core Skills):

These trackers are used to inform our teacher assessment and progression.

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6

Nursery Reception

See the Assessment section of our website for more information on our assessment approach.

Writing Road Maps

Overview of writing skills covered:

EYFS

Year 1 (RWInc)

Year 2 (RWInc)

Year 3 narrative

Year 3 non-narrative