Writing at Sunnyside Primary Academy  

Writing – Intent, Implementation and Impact

Intent

At Sunnyside Primary Academy our writing curriculum enables our children to build increasingly sophisticated and imaginative writing pieces across genres, in both formal and non-formal tones for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. Through the wide experiences on offer within our writing curriculum, we seek to provide our children with the strong knowledge and skills essential for them to articulate and communicate fluently and confidently in their next stage of education and beyond.

Our writing curriculum is underpinned by the National Curriculum and enables pupils to meet the end of Key Stage Attainment targets outlined in the national curriculum and the aims align with those in the national curriculum.

Our curriculum intent for writing is driven through our four curriculum pillars.

Striving for Excellence:

In our primary writing curriculum, we inspire our pupils to strive for excellence by developing a love of a range of fiction and poetry and experiencing a range of accomplished authors and high quality texts by the end of their time in school. Our robust curriculum will help our children secure a lifelong knowledge of different fiction and non-fiction text types that enables pupils to secure real-life skills. Reading, Writing, Grammar and Spelling skills are also developed through a stimulating, inclusive and progressive curriculum experience.

Developing Vocabulary:

In our primary writing curriculum, we emphasise the development of a robust vocabulary as a cornerstone of effective writing. Opportunities for teachers to enhance pupils’ vocabulary arise naturally through their reading analysis, grammar and technique lessons and finally in independent writing. Our curriculum introduces and encourages the adaptation of new, unfamiliar vocabulary and demonstrates to pupils how to understand the relationships between words and understand nuances in meaning. Through vocabulary acquisition lessons and analysis of effective language choices, we develop our pupils' understanding and application of purposeful language choices. We also analyse and develop the ability to use figurative language effectively. Our effectively sequenced approach to writing helps pupils to work out and clarify the meanings of unknown words and words with more than one meaning.

Building Community:

In our writing curriculum we embrace and share our success with our local community by publishing our children’s outcomes. These texts are then shared with our parents and carers to demonstrate the children’s success. We believe in building a sense of community amongst our pupils through spoken-word poetry and actively encourage local poets to perform and work collaboratively alongside our children.

Expanding Cultural Experiences:

Our writing curriculum helps reinforce our commitment to British Values and Protected Characteristics. This is achieved by children exploring a variety of multicultural texts within the writing curriculum and books that promote diversity and inclusion. We endeavour, through fiction, non-fiction and poetry to broaden pupils' horizons by providing diverse and inclusive learning experiences that celebrate different cultures, traditions, perspectives, and histories. The various books we study within our writing curriculum also promote moral themes and ensure our children develop an understanding of topical issues.

Implementation

As we understand reading is vital to success as a writer, we build upon blending phonics to create words and sentences. To achieve this, our curriculum utilises a new inspirational text, across each term, to help develop the children’s ability to understand structure, theme and atmosphere. The high-quality texts, all selected at an appropriate level, have been selected to drive each unit of study.

Once our children have been immersed in a narrative, we encourage our children to adapt genre-specific techniques and adapt their own style of writing through inspiring ‘hook’ lessons designed to give context to the unit of study. We use multimedia approaches, drama opportunities and exciting mysteries and quests to inspire our writers. Writing opportunities are interactive and collaborative - promoting paired talk and textual analysis to engage our children in a variety of genres. Once the children have begun their journey and explored a variety of techniques, we begin using and applying writing skills – focusing on punctuation, grammar and structure – to shape a narrative with purpose. Teachers demonstrate and share examples of competent writing, explain how to use language, punctuation and sentence types to impact the reader and model how to write for a purpose.

We actively encourage our children to make corrections, amend, draft and improve their final writing pieces.  This is achieved through individual and peer evaluation, to help our children become confident and skilful writers. Finally, by ‘publishing’ our writing, our children have the chance to showcase their work and develop pride in their clearly defined final outcome. Our flexible yet structured curriculum allows the children to build yearly on outcomes and ensures they are engaged in a variety of genres, memorable experiences and inspirational narratives.

 

Impact

Through delivering our broad, balanced and sequential writing curriculum, we aim to produce inspired communicators and enthusiastic writers. By using exciting stimulus context lessons, we are creating inquisitive writers who can read for writing, apply and define new and unfamiliar vocabulary choices and understand the genre-specific approaches to writing in many formats. Through following a robust curriculum, we give our children the tools to develop their understanding of spelling and grammar, and we promote a high sense of pride within our children by maintaining a whole school approach to handwriting.  Thus, creating articulate, confident and effective communicators at Sunnyside Primary School.