English: Writing
At Tregony School, we are committed to developing confident, creative and capable writers. We believe that writing is a craft built upon a foundation of reading, talk, and carefully modelled practice. By exposing pupils to rich, high-quality texts and providing them with structured opportunities to explore language, we aim to instil a love of writing while equipping them with the skills to communicate effectively. Our approach to writing is carefully sequenced and consistent across the school, ensuring that all children, from Early Years through to Upper Key Stage Two, are supported and challenged to reach their full potential. We recognise that learning to write is a highly complex process that contains many elements, each of which must be mastered over time to create a successful writer. We use a range of resources and approaches, all underpinned by our teaching and learning model, to weave together the integral elements of writing: reading, talk, composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, spelling, handwriting, and opportunities to edit and redraft.
We believe that, in order to write high quality texts, children need to read high quality texts. It is our intention to immerse pupils within a text for them to fully understand the vocabulary and structure of the story. Therefore, at Tregony School, in Key Stage One, we teach using Talk 4 Writing, an approach developed by Pie Corbett based on a cycle of imitation, innovation and inventing.
Beyond Talk 4 Writing, children’s writing journey is shaped by an approach developed by Jane Considine called The Write Stuff. This method emphasises exposure to high-quality texts and, alongside inspirational reading, explicitly models the writing process through a technique known as Sentence Stacking. An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into three chunks:
1. Initiate section – time to inspire through the use of a stimulus; pupils are immersed in a rich language discussion and activities to provide a wealth of vocabulary to aid their writing
2. Model section – the teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
3. Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
After completing their Sentence Stacking lessons, children have the chance to apply their learning by planning and writing an independent piece, inspired by the text they have been studying. They reflect on their work by checking it against the agreed success criteria, which are built from the skills explored in class. Finally, pupils edit and redraft their writing to produce a finished piece.
Tregony School follows the Read Write Inc. scheme for teaching spelling. This starts when pupils are ready, in year 2, as a continuation of the Read Write Inc. phonics scheme. Through the scheme, children are taught relevant spelling rules as well as those words that are statutory for each year group.
We use LetterJoin for handwriting. Handwriting lessons are delivered on a frequent basis and the skill of handwriting is reinforced across all lessons.