Writing at Thames View
Children start making marks on paper at an early age and from these early mark makers we aim to develop confident and fluent writers. Across the school, children are encouraged to write for different purposes and audiences, and we constantly provide opportunities for them to develop their vocabulary and sentence structure skills.
The National Curriculum for Writing consists of:
- Transcription – spelling and handwriting
- Composition – articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing (this includes planning drafting, writing, evaluating, proof-reading, editing and reading aloud their work)
- Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation
Children are taught these elements of writing through a mix of cross-curricular themes and discrete teaching sequences. Teachers promote writing and look for ways to inspire and motivate pupils so that they see themselves as writers.
Rather than focus on particular genres, at Thames View Primary we will focus on the four main purposes for writing. Teaching up to 10 or more text types does not always make it clear the purpose and core features of that text type. It is also important to note that many text types share common features. his approach to writing better prepares pupils to recognise different genres and which purpose they are linked to: they’re not a distinct type in themselves to be taught in a vacuum. So instead of seeing newspapers as newspapers and biographies as biographies, children will begin to recognise both these text types as texts to inform. With this in place, pupils are more likely to notice specific text features and structures, grammar and sentence structures, word level and choice and punctuation that cross between the two different text types being taught. Therefore, children do not have to scrap everything they learnt and start a completely new purpose: they are able to use their recently taught knowledge to help build on different text types and therefore retain the different aspects of the purpose for writing. This can be valuably seen in success criteria for different text types.
This approach has been supported by Michael Tidd’s ‘4 writing Purposes’. For further information please visit https://michaelt1979.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/writing-for-a-purpose-or-4/
Purposes of Writing
There are four main purposes of writing. Each area can be broken down into phases and how this could look is presented in the following progress documents.
- Writing to entertain (Y1 – Y6)
- Writing to inform (Y1 – Y6
- Writing to persuade (Y3 – Y6)
- Writing to discuss (Y4 – Y6)
What we write about
The stimulus to promote writing is taken from a wide-range of sources; our quality texts from reading, cross-curricular learning, visual literacy and also response to current local, national or global events. At Thames View Primary School, we constantly review our writing prompts and stimulus to ensure that we are maximising all opportunities to engage and enhance learning.