'We Journey With Jesus Beside Us'

Writing

Intent

At St Dunstan's, we are creating our own bespoke writing curriculum starting this year. Our intent for writing is to foster a love of reading and a passion for writing through a carefully planned and engaging curriculum. We aim to:

Develop Proficient Writers: Ensure that all children can write fluently and with confidence across a range of contexts, purposes, and audiences. We strive to build on their prior knowledge to extend their skills in both creative and formal writing.
Promote Creativity: Developing a writing curriculum with high-quality texts at its core. A main objective is to inspire a genuine love for writing among our pupils, ensuring that they not only enjoy their writing lessons but also develop a profound appreciation for the texts to which they are exposed.
Cultivate Critical Thinking: Encourage students to think critically about language and its impact. This involves analysing texts, evaluating language choices, and understanding the craft of writing.

Implementation

To achieve our intent, we have implemented a writing curriculum underpinned by the following strategies:

Structured Writing Programme: Our writing programme spans across KS1 and KS2 and is aligned with the National Curriculum. We revisit key skills throughout different year groups, ensuring they are built upon as students advance through the school.
Adaptation and Support: We adapt learning to cater for individual pupils' needs. This includes targeted support in class for pupils with additional needs and providing challenging writing opportunities for more able writers, ensuring that all students make progress relative to their starting points.
A Clear Learning Journey: Each learning journey starts with a structured exploration of the selected text, allowing children the opportunity to develop their language and vocabulary. We believe that understanding the text is paramount and developing language is key, which is why we place a significant emphasis on verbal retelling. This guidance is taken from the Education Endowment Foundation’s Improving Literacy report. Through this process, students are encouraged to articulate their thoughts and interpretations. This strategy aims to remove any barriers related to comprehending the text, enabling learners to focus primarily on their composition skills and the accuracy of their Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar (SPaG).

Impact

The effectiveness of our writing curriculum is evident in various ways:

Engagement and Attitudes: Student feedback reflects a positive attitude towards writing, with many expressing a desire to write both in and out of school.
Enjoyment of Literature: Children enjoy the carefully selected texts that they are exposed to in writing lessons. They can talk about these texts freely and positively.
Progress of Skills: Our pupils make progress because skills are revisited often. They are given many opportunities throughout the curriculum to improve.