Writing at Swaffham Primary Academy 

Intent 

At Swaffham C of E Primary Academy, we strive to provide a writing curriculum that will ensure our pupils become confident writers. It is our aim to ensure that children transition from our equipped to be able to write for a range of purposes and audiences, as well as being able to express themselves confidently and fluently in the world that they belong to. Our writing curriculum, which is underpinned by the Primary National Curriculum, is ambitious and well-structured to provide all pupils with knowledge and skills for writing. These progresses year on year and this ensures that they will believe in their own writing.

At Swaffham Primary Academy, we provide exciting opportunities for the children to learn how to write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of purposes.  Staff actively encourage children to communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions through providing writing opportunities that will allow them to shine. Our writing units are supported through texts, videos and our wider curriculum to give them context, knowledge and understanding to help them to write independently. To support our pupils with their writing skills, teachers actively model to the class to help inform their own writing and to make improvements. Moreover, pupils are supported to write using increasingly wider vocabulary, a wide use of grammar and spelling whilst ensuring they are effectively writing in the correct tone and formality to suit the purpose and context of their writing.

Implementation 

English Lessons

At Swaffham Primary Academy, English is taught four times per week across the whole of our school. Each of our ‘four C’ curriculum areas (Conservation, Culture, Conflict and Communication) have been broken down into three text types for each unit. Each class will be able to use their experiences from their foundation learning to support their content knowledge for English. Additionally, our writing units use high-quality texts as a stimulus to support and inspire their own writing. Our Reading Masters sessions also support each writing unit by providing a range of key examples from the same text type that the children are currently writing. This helps to broaden their understanding of vocabulary and writing for a purpose.  To help support progression with composition and transcription, we use long, medium and short term planning as well as the use of progression maps to ensures that a variety of genres are taught and skills are built from EYFS through to KS2. Through planning our curriculum, children are given the chance to write in-depth whilst also being taught the skills of planning, drafting and refining their written work over time and to increase their independence with writing pieces of work.  In Reception, writing skills are built in a range of ways such as: letter formation and writing practise during their phonics lessons, a writing table which is always linked to the current stimulus in English, activities for writing during provision and writing in their English lessons. Writing within their English book increases throughout the year as the children build their confidence with their phonics, spelling and letter formation. Children will be guided to begin with adult-led sessions and adult-supported sessions to build up the children’s independence with mark making and sentence construction.

Mighty Writer

To help support sentence construction within EYFS and KS1, we have introduced Mighty Writer as a visual and interactive approach to writing. Mighty Writer is displayed within our EYFS and KS1 classrooms, these contain a range of resources (such as picture prompts, sentence mats and punctuation mats) to help show how we can construct and edit our sentences. It provides a fantastic modelling approach for children which allows them to get involved constructing sentences and motivates them to write coherent sentences independently.  

Olivia (Reception) ‘Mighty Writer helps me to make sentences and I like to write sentences.’

Alice (Year 1) ‘Mighty Writer helps me to listen and learn! It helps me with my writing and I can use adjectives to help describe in my writing.

Jolly Grammar and Spelling 

To support the step from Jolly Phonics in Reception, KS1 and KS2 follow the progressive scheme of Jolly Grammar and Spelling. This provides discrete lessons for grammar objectives as well as teaching spelling patterns and rules. This follows seamlessly from the use of Jolly Phonics in Reception and supports the children with a format and a pattern that they understand well as well as build on their phonics knowledge to support spelling quickly and accurately. Jolly Grammar has a range of prompts to support children’s grammatical knowledge such as actions and colour coding for different parts of speech.  Each year group has a one-hour session of Jolly Grammar per week as well as a 20-minute spelling input followed by a spelling activity every day of the week. KS2 children are tested on spelling words each week based on the input that they have received in that week.

Handwriting - Letter Joins 

To teach and model handwriting, we use the Letter Joins scheme of work. In Reception and Year 1, children use lessons to support letter formation and letter sizing. Letter formation is practised every day through our phonics sessions and extra intervention is given to support letter sizing and formation. In Year 2, children progress into to practising lead ins to their letters and progress to joining their handwriting by the end of the year. From Year 3 onwards, children are given short handwriting sessions to practise building fluency with joining their handwriting.