26th April 2024Writing
“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out” Literacy Worldwide.org
At Hinchley Wood Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring every child leaves our school as a confident, determined and enthusiastic writer. Writing is an essential skill to equip our pupils with in order for them to communicate, share their self-expression and develop across all areas of the curriculum. Writing makes children’s thinking and learning visible and permanent. It provides children with opportunities to explain and refine their ideas to others and themselves. Our teachers have high expectations for all the children to achieve and enjoy the art of writing and to be able to use the skills they acquire in a range of contexts. We strive to ensure all children can communicate clearly in written form and become masters of language.
We teach English through "The Power of Reading". This is a programme provided by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) which puts quality children’s literature at the heart of the curriculum. It also supports our work in teaching literacy creatively and effectively. The Power of Reading’s immersive approach provides pupils with a wide range of learning opportunities to develop and enrich their understanding of what they read. This includes booktalk, debate, reading journals, role play and drama, use of visual images and story mapping. By using high quality texts, we carefully plan sequenced lessons which enable children to develop their writing skills through a range of varied and purposeful activities. Children have the opportunity to plan, draft and improve their and others’ work. Through this process we teach grammar terminology, appropriate to each year group, and provide opportunities for children to apply their knowledge in their own writing.
Through our whole school writing outcomes, we ensure that there is progression across all year groups and opportunities for children to develop their writing understanding. By using a range of books of different genres throughout the school, children are able to reflect upon the world they live in, develop a rich vocabulary and widen their literary experience. Children have the opportunity to respond and write for a range of purposes, such as writing narratives, instructions, diary entries, information texts and poems.
“Developing children as writers is so much more than asking them to remember grammatical constructions or tricky spellings. It is a complicated and intricate process – and if you enable a child to become a writer you have given them a voice, supported them to communicate and provided them with a skill that is vital for all of their schooling and to their life beyond.” – CLPE
