Elmstead Primary School

At Elmstead Primary School, our children will learn about the elements on the National Curriculum to ensure they are confident in all areas of the writing strand in line with the end of Key Stage 2 expectations.

Our genre coverage is based on high-quality texts from different authors and cultures allowing a wide variety of genres in fiction, non-fiction and poetry to be taught.

To support the children with their writing skills, various scaffolding and learning resources are used such as word banks, videos, picture prompts, pre-populated planning sheets, sound buttons, the use of technology and cut up sentences. 

Our writing process begins with an independent cold write which is used to inform teachers’ planning and provide a baseline of what the children already know about a particular genre and what features require further development. The main part of the unit starts by identifying the purpose and audience for writing as well as exploring a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like). A WAGOLL is used to model a high-quality example of writing from the focus genre and it allows children to identify the features they will need to use in their independent writing. After this, the main sequence of lessons begins where the features identified from the cold write are taught and the children have opportunities to apply their knowledge after seeing high-quality examples modelled. In addition to writing lessons, stand-alone grammar lessons are taught weekly. The aim of these lessons are to pre-teach grammar features for writing lessons and address misconceptions of concepts and grammar features that have already been taught. 

The planning stage is an important part of the process as this is where the children begin to think about their final independent piece of writing. At this stage, the children have been immersed in various examples of the genre from the WAGOLL and the sequence of lessons in order to plan their own. To conclude the unit, the children complete an independent hot write on the same genre which, once the hot write has been completed, children are given time to proof-read and make edits to their writing. This could be independently or alongside a peer. Finally, a best copy of the hot write is used to link back to the purpose and audience of writing identified at the start of the unit as well as providing an opportunity to practise handwriting skills.