We recognise that writing is a complex process but is fundamental to every subject and beyond the classroom. We are committed to supporting our students as they express themselves through their writing.
We explicitly teach a range of strategies to support students as they plan, write and edit short answers and more complex texts. We recognise that writing is a process and encourage our students to self-regulate their writing by giving them time and strategies to think, discuss, plan, respond, monitor, review and reflect upon their writing.
Students are encouraged to use graphic organisers, sentence stems and structure strips to help them to organise their writing. We encourage them to explore strategies to know how to remove scaffolding when they have internalised an approach to writing in a specific subject area.
We ask students to review their written responses and use Mastery Checks to indicate where they have addressed specific criteria for a particular task.
We teach students how to connect their reading to their writing, giving them models to support them as they write. By using real world articles and experts’ texts, we encourage students to write as a subject expert. We want students to be aware of how they should construct their writing for a specific audience and purpose – thinking about vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and tone.
We support students to interrogate a question to support their response and to understand what they are specifically being asked to do.
We encourage students to use accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Supporting writing at home:
Encourage your child to hand write tasks as well as to use a computer to complete responses.
Help your child to remember that writing is a process and that reviewing and editing are valuable skills. Neat crossing out to replace vocabulary, arrows to show a change in organisation and asterisks to show added content all demonstrate excellent thinking and reflection. Such responses don’t necessarily need to be copied out to look beautiful.
Ask your child to think about and talk about what they’re going to write before they begin:
- “Have you done something like this before?”
- “How can I prepare to respond to this?”
Encourage your child to plan their writing, perhaps using a graphic organiser.
During the writing process, remind your child to monitor how their chosen approach is going: “Is this method working?”, “Should I change how I’m doing this?” or “Is this paragraph about the question?” Encourage them to adapt their approach if necessary. Remind them to use sentence stems or structure strips if appropriate.
Remind your child to read through what they have written – reading it aloud can help – ask them to make corrections and improvements, usually in purple pen. Ask them to review and reflect upon how they approached the task so they do what worked, next time.
Encourage your child to read articles which are linked to their subjects to influence their own writing style in a particular area.
