Writing

 

The Vision of Writing

At Devonshire Primary Academy, we want our pupils to become confident, capable and enthusiastic writers who have a genuine love of writing; we want our pupils to be confident in their use of writing to express themselves and communicate with others; and we want our pupils to take pride in their work.

We use the ‘Talk for Writing’ approach to enable our children to write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes, internalising the language structures needed across a range of text types such as: explanations, instructions, reports, balanced arguments, stories and poems.  This is a creative and rigorous approach developed by the author Pie Corbett and is fundamentally based on the key principles of how children learn.

Watch the clip below as Pie Corbett explains more about Talk for Writing and why it works.

‘Talk for Writing’ allows our children to imitate the key language patterns they need for a particular text type orally before they try reading and looking at it more closely.  Through fun activities that help them to rehearse the tune of the language they need, followed by modelled and shared writing to show them how to craft their texts, our children are helped to write in the same style.  They are also given meaningful opportunities each half term to revisit and review a range of text types and apply new learning in different contexts.  Grammar and punctuation are taught both explicitly and implicitly within our writing lessons and are used as tools to make sure our readers understand exactly what we want to say.  Our children learn to plan, draft, revise, edit and present their work and we give our children the chance to reflect on their own and others’ writing and evaluate its success.

We teach children how to segment to spell using our Phonic Scheme in EYFS and Year 1.  This is supplemented from Year 2 onwards with weekly lessons that cover words and spelling patterns specified by the National Curriculum and teach children further strategies they can use to spell words accurately and independently.

Throughout school, our children are encouraged to write in a neat, legible style.  This begins in EYFS and KS1 with the ‘Squiggle’ Scheme which connects brain and movement.  This is built on throughout the school with weekly handwriting practice, often linked to work in spelling.

We know that writing is an important life skill and we want to enable our children to communicate effectively and creatively using written language throughout their school and work life and we want to equip them with the knowledge, desire and enthusiasm to be successful life-long writers.

Writing at Home

There are lots of ways you can support your child to write!

Encourage your child to record their writing in a variety of ways.  They may wish to keep a diary, write a story or send a postcard.  Support their ideas and give plenty of encouragement.