Curridge Primary School

English - Words take you places

Intent

We know that a child's reading and writing skills are crucial to their success in school as they will allow them to access the breadth of the curriculum and improve their communication and language skills.  Studies show that reading for pleasure makes a big difference to children’s educational performance. Likewise, evidence suggests that children who read for enjoyment every day not only perform better in reading tests than those who do not, but also develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge and a better understanding of other cultures.

Across the school, we:

• Understand the role reading plays in developing writers and the value of being immersed in high quality literature
• Ensure children have experience of a breadth of texts including those that are visual and digital
• Provide a range of meaningful opportunities to write for real purposes and audiences and to respond to writing as a reader
• Develop an understanding of the craft of writing by engaging meaningfully with professional authors and their processes
• Understand and model the craft and process of writing  
• Support children to identify as writers and to develop their own voice
• Give children time and space to develop their own ideas in writing
• Use creative teaching approaches that build imagination and give time for oral rehearsal
• Ensure the teaching of phonics, grammar and spelling is embedded in context
• Celebrate writing through publication and presentation

Implementation

When our children become writers, we have given them a voice, supported them to communicate and provided them with a skill that is vital for all of their schooling and to their life beyond. Reading and writing is inextricably linked and allows children to lift the words off the printed page to enrich their own written work.

Across the school, we:

• Encourage children to draw on their experience of reading when shaping their own writing
• Share rich examples of writing, both on and off the page
• Reflect cultural, social and linguistic diversity through a wide range of carefully chosen texts
• Introducing a world beyond the familiar
• Ensure that children can understand how meaning is conveyed in other forms such as film, illustration, digital texts and performance
• Expose children to a range of texts that demonstrate expressive, informational and imaginative writing so children begin to understand how to control and manipulate the conventions of writing for a range of purposes
• Provide a culture of book talk to deepen reader response and allow children to explore the effect that the author of a text has created on the reader
• Give children opportunities to reflect on their own texts  
• Create opportunities for writing inspired by meaningful events and experiences in texts and real life.
• Provide children with ways to talk and write about their own feelings, experiences and interests
• Link writing with communication
• Validate children’s writing with appropriate response
• Provide opportunities to see and learn from a professional writer’s practice  
• Allow children time to plan and craft ideas
• Model the planning, drafting, responding, revising and editing process
• Engage in cooperative writing that includes the teacher as writer and allows children to be supported
• Write alongside children, articulating the thought process
• Teach children how to reflect critically on their own writing
• Publishing children’s work for an audience so there is a purpose for their writing  
• Use technology as a powerful tool for learning  

Impact

• Children cultivate identity, an understanding of the world and their place in it in relation to others
• Children are engaged in writing, they have to want to write, see the purpose in doing so and the opportunities it gives for them to have a voice
• Children manipulate and control writing to achieve intent as a writer for purpose and effect on the reader
• Writing is a part of daily life, linked to play, fictional and real experiences  
• Children reflect on or capture experiences, share feelings, or use humour to engage a reader
• Children are able to develop authentic personal voice, style, stamina and range as a writer.
• Children enjoy writing expressively, imaginatively and informatively for purpose – they become authors
• Children understand how the writing process works, use and apply their learning and write freely for their own purpose and pleasure

In the Early Years:

• Children engage in writing or mark making activities for their own satisfaction  
• There are well stocked writing areas with a wide range of materials and media for writing, including appropriate technology to engage in wider forms of writing
• We give children time and space to use writing as a tool for thinking and an opportunity to share ideas
• We support children to tune into the creativity needed for writing through a range of experiences
• We encourage children to explore ideas prior to composition through art, drama and role-play, music and movement and small world play
• Mr Rowan Bear brings 'Our Terrific Ten' every term to foster excitiment in books and a love of reading
• Children take part in ‘book talk’ so they deepen their understanding of characters and events enabling them to articulate ideas effectively in their own writing
• Children to hear texts read aloud, hear and see them performed, and perform them themselves
• Children have time and space for drama, so they explore real and fictional situations through talk or role-play  
• Children develop ideas through art and illustration