At Milnrow Parish we aim for our pupils to love writing and this be an experience, filled with knowledge, understanding but above all, fun! We believe that our children should be free to explore their creativity through writing, being bold, brave and ambitious. Our writing curriculum has been constructed so that our pupils develop their writing skills throughout their journey at Milnrow Parish and across all subjects. Their transcriptional, compositional understanding and knowledge allows them to exceed in their learning. For us, writing should be a memorable experience underpinned by our writing cycle; we aim for pupils to strive for greatness and value the work that they produce.
English Curriculum Intent
We passionately encourage reading to nourish our writing, using ambitious, imaginative and engaging texts. In turn, this develops our pupils’ desires and motivation. We strive to support our children to become resilient, determined writers who recognise their own ideas but are also stimulated by knowledge they have adopted from the texts studied. Our pupils are continuously exposed to different genres of writing.
We have always aimed to strengthen our craft when teaching writing. We understand that our pupils’ abilities to be fluent writers comes from effective transcription skills. This means that our children have an understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) and understanding morphology (word structure) and orthography (spelling structure) of words.
We model to our pupils that composition includes the articulations and communication of ideas, which then need to be organised and well structured for a reader. We aim to ensure that our children know the purpose of their writing as an author's intent is essential when writing.
Our writing curriculum aims to stimulate creativity and a yearning to write. We wish to create empowered learners who strive for greatness and love writing. Our aim is to not only teach our pupils the fundamental skills of writing but demonstrate its skills for their futures. Each year group has a set of reading core texts, which they follow across the year. This text both acts as our class reader and as a stimulus for our English work. From this, our writing curriculum is mapped out in a wide range of genres based on 4 key areas:
Writing to Entertain Writing to Persuade Writing to Express Feelings Writing to Inform and Explain
Our unit of work is structured by our Writing Cycle:
- Immersing them into their writing stimuli;
- Exploring high-quality extracts and texts;
- Creating a ‘boxed’ criteria with audience and purpose being the centre;
- Planning their own piece of writing; creating a first draft of their work;
- Evaluating their own (and their peers) writing
- Publishing a final piece.
This cycle incorporates vital aptitudes for skilled writers: Oracy (the discussion around texts and language), transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulation and structure of writing). Across the school, our children utilise these skills and they are rooted in every unit of work.
English Curriculum Implementation
Our teaching of composition is based upon a writing cycle. This is something that has been implemented and embedded into the classroom. We conduct a regular audit of writing, taking feedback from both the staff and pupils in order to maintain its effectiveness each year. Our approach to writing is underpinned by a high-quality text that acts as a stimuli. For example, in Year 2, the text, Lila and the Secret of Rain links to a diary entry as the character Lila, from the story. In Year 5, the pupils write to the Home Secretary to raise awareness of refugees after reading the text, The Boy at the Back of the Class. Through our writing cycle, pupils become engaged with a text, explore the language, plot, characters and themes before unpicking the features that have been used. This then allows the pupils’ creative ideas to flourish as they work towards planning their own piece of work, incorporating new skills and structures.
English Curriculum Impact
At Milnrow, we use formative and summative assessment to guide our teaching. Staff use this information to inform their short-term planning and support pupils through the use of interventions. Our assessments are key to not only supporting our children but also challenging our more able.
The assessment objectives for each year group come directly from the National Curriculum. They have been carefully mapped out for each year group to ensure progression in transcription, composition and grammar.
Teachers use formative methods to analytically evaluate what the pupils know as a unit progresses. This is completed through a range of methods, on a daily basis. This, in turn, informs out staffs’ future planning and the structure that they take to guide the pupils writing. This assessment also supports their summative assessment. At the end of each half term, pupils produce written work as part of their writing portfolio. This is assessed against their year group objectives and end points. The teaching and the attainment in writing is regularly monitored through book scrutinies, pupil/teacher voice, observations and learning walks.