At Priorswood Primary School, our aim is for children to develop into confident, capable writers who can write for a range of purposes. Alongside this, we endeavour to develop a positive attitude towards writing to allow children to realise its importance and value. The curriculum aims to ensure that children write with accuracy and creativity but are also able to write for different audiences.
The teaching and learning of Writing is made up of three key strands, transcription, composition and grammar and punctuation, and at Priorswood we seek to ensure that writing is taught in a way that allows children to develop in all three areas. Transcription skills are taught to ensure that children are writing accurately and are applying the phonics and spelling rules in their writing. Composition skills are taught so that children are able to write freely for a range of purposes but also teaches them to become reflective writers who can rehearse, evaluate and edit their own work in order to improve its quality. The final aspect, grammar and punctuation, is taught so that children can use different sentence types and punctuation in order to have a desired effect on the reader but also to ensure that it makes sense.
Writing is taught daily through Unlocking Letters and Sounds, literacy lessons and grammar focus sessions. The accuracy is also addressed in weekly handwriting and spelling lessons. Literacy units are based around a high quality text and are driven by the National Curriculum statements and grammar expectations for that year group. During a unit, children will produce two main outcomes, a fiction and non-fiction, as well as have many other opportunities known as Short Burst Writes, to produce independent pieces of writing throughout the unit. A piece of writing is then written at the end of the unit linked to the wider curriculum. This approach allows for previous learning to be re-visited, implemented and consolidated independently as well as new learning to take place through shared writing leading to a final piece of work.
