Skip to content ↓

Woodvale Primary Academy

Writing

We believe that writing is vital in developing the children’s ability to express themselves and our English lessons have a strong focus on vocabulary development. This helps the children to understand ambitious texts and articulate themselves across a broad range of contexts. 

Writing

At Woodvale, writing lessons are based on the Talk for Writing framework. This is an exciting teaching philosophy which enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version both in fiction and non-fiction genres.

We believe that talk is essential in developing our pupils’ thinking as it is the foundation which leads to high quality written work. We promote the importance of being a confident speaker as well as an attentive listener, modelling our expectations of what this looks like in the classroom. Through classroom talk facilitated by our teachers, the children are given the opportunity to share their ideas aloud and check that they make sense before they begin writing. They can also review and improve these in response to verbal feedback and useful suggestions from their peers. We know that the ability to speak and write with fluency and confidence is important in both education and as a member of society, and plan our writing lessons carefully to ensure that there are lots of opportunities for our pupils to talk about what they are thinking before putting pencil to paper. 

Across the school, we teach writing using high-quality texts ranging from picture books to poetry, which sit alongside engaging real-life experiences and school trips. Throughout their time at Woodvale, children will write in a variety of forms. Children are taught to become writers developing their skills in writing a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including diary entries, newspaper reports, information texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, storytelling and discussion to stimulate the imagination, then move on to exploring vocabulary, sentence structure and original writing.

There are writing opportunities across the curriculum, with children applying the knowledge and skills they have acquired in their English lessons.

At the end of their Woodvale journey, we aim for children to be equipped with the tools they need to be proficient writers.

Handwriting, Spelling and Grammar

Handwriting at Woodvale is taught discretely, starting with mark making in Early Years and continuing through the school culminating with using legible, joined handwriting in Upper Key Stage 2. From Year 5 onwards children whose handwriting is consistently of a high standard are able to write in pen.

In Years 1 and 2 spellings are taught within daily phonics teaching, following the Little Wandle Phonics Scheme. In Years 3 – 6 the National Curriculum statutory word lists are followed supported through the use of The Spelling Shed.  Spellings form a part of weekly homework with children being tested each week.

Throughout the school from Year 1 through to Year 6 grammar forms part of English lessons, linking to the genre being taught.