Intent

Writing is a crucial part of our curriculum at Holy Innocents’. By the end of Year Six we hope that our children have developed a love of writing and are able to express their thoughts and ideas clearly and creatively through their written work. We also intend to create writers who can edit and improve their own writing and to enable pupils to be able to confidently use the essential skills of grammar, punctuation and spelling. At Holy Innocents’ we set high expectations for all our children to take pride in their work and have a fluent, cursive handwriting style alongside allowing their imaginations to flourish.

Implementation

We have adopted the scheme of learning from the Literacy Tree. We believe the exposure of children’s literature within the primary school setting is vital as a rich context for learning; not only within English as a subject but to support building a reading culture throughout the school. We aim to use high quality books that offer opportunities for empathy and can aid philosophical enquiry, as a means of developing the spoken language requirements through debate, drama and discussion using the issues raised through, and within, the text.

At Holy Innocents’ we place a large emphasis on writing opportunities being made to feel real and authentic. Books offer this opportunity: our aim would be that that children have real reasons to write, whether to explain, persuade, inform or instruct and that where possible, this can be embedded within text or linked to a curriculum area. In many cases objectives are covered more than once and children have opportunities to apply these several times over the course of a year, as well as to consolidate prior knowledge from previous years. This approach supports children to think deeply and develop skills with depth.

We also believe it is important that children learn how to write for different purposes and we aim for children to apply their learning from English lessons into different subject areas. During learning on non-fiction units especially, children will have the chance to apply their learning of key features and writing styles into the foundation subjects to really show what they have learnt. It is crucial that Holy Innocents’ children leave our school with the knowledge that extended writing can take place in multiple subject areas and for a variety of purposes and we believe that our curriculum can allow them to do this.

Impact

By the time pupils leave Holy Innocents’, we aim for every child to become confident at writing at length for different purposes and, most importantly, to have developed a clear love and enthusiasm for writing. We hope that by embedding a love of learning through high quality texts, we will have equipped our children with tools for writing by exposing them to a multitude of different texts and genres of writing. They will gain a wide vocabulary which impacts on their written work; they will learn to accurately adapt their writing styles for different purposes, and they will be able to write clearly and in a sophisticated manner. We also aim to develop confident and reflective writers who, with their teachers, can celebrate their own successes. Most importantly, we hope children will become inspired writers who apply their knowledge outside of the curriculum and use their writing talents in later life.