Intent

We aim to produce writers who can express ideas and emotions for a wide range of purposes and audiences. Through high quality class texts and engaging experiences, children are inspired to write imaginative, informative or persuasive texts of varying lengths. They have a rich vocabulary and an appreciation of the nuances of language which they can apply in subjects across the curriculum. They are able to employ effective grammatical choices with which to communicate their intent in a range styles from the informal to the most formal. Children have the basic phonic and spelling skills to write with confidence words which are increasingly complex and their handwriting is fluent, joined and legible. They are able to use the full range of punctuation accurately and appropriately based on the style of writing and are able to use a range of layout features to navigate the reader.

Implementation

At St Dunstan's Catholic School, we have  based our approach on "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine, to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing.  "The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.  An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:

1. Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.

1. Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.

1. Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.

Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
 
"The Write Stuff"  uses three essential components to support children in becoming great writers
The three zones of writing :-

• IDEAS -  The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.
• TOOLS - The GRAMMARISTICS. The grammar rules of our language system and an accessible way to target weaknesses in pupils grammatical and linguistic structures.
• TECHNIQUES - The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.​
  

Impact

Writing is assessed through a variety of methods of verbal feedback and written feedback, with clear targets or next steps set. Success criteria, usually generated by the children, are used to support children’s writing, self-assessment and peer assessment. More general and progressively more challenging checklists are used by each year group to more formally assess pieces. As a school, we moderate writing internally half-termly, but also moderate our judgements at regular moderation events with cluster schools, all of which are used to ensure judgements are sound. In Year R, 2 and 6, government assessment frameworks are used to assess writing.
​
Standards in writing are monitored in variety of ways in addition to the above. Assessment data is used to look at standards in each year group and is used to assess the attainment and progress of whole classes and key groups such as girls and boys, children in receipt of PP, SEND and Prior Attainment groups. Work and planning scrutinies and pupil voice consultations also allow us to gauge attainment and progress in each class and for individual children.