Writing at Wheatley

At Wheatley writing, alongside reading, is a priority. Successful learners in writing ask questions, they build on their own ideas and the ideas of others. To ensure that we enable children to become confident and skilled writers, we apply the following intent and principles to our teaching of this curriculum area.

Writing Intent and Principles

Implementation: The Teaching of Writing

At Wheatley, we strive for children to be inspired to write and we believe that children write powerfully when they have the opportunity to experience:

• The richness of regular reading
• The modelling of writing
• The interest and valuing of ideas by the adults around them
• The premise of relentless challenge

To nurture great writers, we use a range of effective teaching approaches.

A Quality Text Curriculum

We work from quality texts that are pre chosen to enable the children to experience a range of writing genres. These writing genres are based on four key elements and purposes of writing; to entertain, to inform, to discuss and to persuade.

• A range of genres are decided upon to be covered in a two year cycle across the year groups. 
• We use our quality texts, to explore story, illustrations, vocabulary and characters. This includes poetry and Shakespeare options as well as termly opportunities to publish.
• We start by thinking about the purpose and audience of what we want to write and how this affects how we need to write it. This is central to effective writing, pupils need to have a reason to write and someone to write for.
• We look at what a high quality version looks like, teaching skills that will enable us to achieve this ourselves, supporting everyone to make progress and to be challenged, eventually withdrawing this support to promote independence.                                                                                                                                                                 

• Publishing our work is key, we do this in a variety of ways, by reading to our intended audience, developing a parent workshop or festival of work, creating books or displays, blogs or publishing on our website pages or entering competitions. This can be particularly exciting when the children see their work published in a real book for the world to see!
• Our Year 5/6's recently had their diary entries published, what a fabulous achievement!                                                                                               

Modelled Writing

Modelling is the most significant strategy used to develop children’s talk about writing and the quality of writing. The voice the teachers model is shaping the same voice that children have in their own heads when they are writing. When teachers are modelling, what they demonstrate is the thought process for writing.

                                                                       (Transforming Writing: Interim Evaluation Report)

Children need to see how a writer writes. The shared writing we create stays up on working walls in the classroom to allow children to magpie and aid the progress in their writing. The rich vocabulary gleaned from our texts is used in all of our modelling for the children to use in their writing.

Guided Writing

Guided writing is a valuable strategy that our teachers use to support children's writing development. Take a look at the table below to see what guided writing includes at each phase of education at Wheatley.

Our Writing Learning Journey

All of these strategies are packaged in to our writing learning journeys which are displayed in classrooms and show progression through our units of learning. Click on the links below to find out more about each step in the learning process.