'If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write!'
At Tywardreath School our vision is to create a safe and stimulating environment where all children feel they belong and are able to challenge themselves, take risks and flourish both academically and socially. To develop our children so that they value and respect their own and others individuality, culture and heritage. We are committed to providing a place of excellence with high standards.
To achieve our vision all our children should:
- Enjoy their primary school years and develop high self-esteem regardless of ‘academic’ ability.
- Feel safe and secure and have a passion for learning and experience success.
- Develop perseverance, flexibility, independence in a wide range of learning skills.
- Be well mannered, respecting themselves, others and the environment.
- Make a positive contribution to the school and the wider community.
- Enjoy equal opportunities to succeed
- Develop lively, inquiring minds and become confident communicators.
- Experience teaching of the highest quality and develop core skills to a high level.
- Appreciate the beauty, the diversity of the world and their duty to protect it.
Intent
At Tywardreath school we believe that writing is a key skill for life and we aim to encourage all children to be confident writers who can write for a variety of purposes and occasions across a range of genres. By the end of Year Six we intend our children to have developed a love of writing and to be able to express their thoughts and ideas clearly and creatively through the written word. We hope to create writers who can re-read, edit and improve their own writing and confidently use the essential skills of phonics, spelling, grammar and punctuation. At Tywardreath we set high expectations for all our children to take pride in their writing and have a fluent, cursive handwriting style alongside allowing their creativity to flourish.
Implementation
In EYFS and Key Stage One ReadWriteInc is used as a systematic approach to teaching daily phonics. Through this process children are taught to form graphemes correctly and segment sounds for writing. Children are provided the opportunity to write, progressing from words and captions, to phonetically plausible sentences which can be joined to form short narratives. From Year 2 to Year 6 year group specific spelling patterns and the common exception words are taught daily using a variety of teaching strategies and assessed half termly.
As children move on from RWI, they begin to learn how to write whole texts using a Talk for Writing approach. The whole school planning document plots out different genres and texts types as well as progressive grammar and spelling patterns.
Throughout this process children are encouraged to verbally learn and rehearse a quality text (WAGOLL), learn and identify the grammar features of the text type and apply them to writing of their own. Children are provided with the opportunity to edit and improve their writing using success criteria and modelled examples.
Impact
The impact on our children is that they make good progress from their own personal starting points and have the knowledge and skills to be able to write successfully for a purpose and audience.
Assessment in writing is ongoing as teachers mark children’s outcomes against the success criteria for the genre to include age appropriate grammar, punctuation and spelling patterns. Children are assessed termly in spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge (NFER) and this data is used to inform next steps for writing.
Teachers moderate children’s writing each term and this is evidenced on our data system Educater.
Pupil progress meetings are used to analyse gaps in children’s knowledge and gain an overview of specific groups of children across the school who are on track, greater depth or need additional support.