Writing

Vision

We use a carefully selected spine of books to underpin our curriculum, develop vocabulary and inspire engaging writing lessons. The children consistently have access to high-quality texts by a range of authors throughout their time at Moss Hall. Often the texts chosen will purposefully link to other areas of our broad and balanced curriculum and act as models of excellence for the children’s own writing. This helps to enrich learning in other subjects and allows our pupils to make connections between all areas of the curriculum in their writing. We follow a clear lesson sequence that begins by immersing the children in the style of writing we are expecting them to produce. After this process, the class is introduced to new writing skills and presented with lots of opportunities to practise and apply them before creating a piece of independent writing. Finally, the children are taught to carefully proofread, edit and redraft their work to encourage further independence.

 

Handwriting and spelling

At Moss Hall we…

• use the Debbie Hepplewhite method to fully join our handwriting
• learn new spelling rules each week and apply them in our writing
• check our work carefully for spelling errors and use a range of strategies to correct them
• use Spelling Frame to support segmenting, blending and recognition of spelling rules in school and at home

 

 

Vocabulary 

At Moss Hall we...

• challenge ourselves to use interesting and precise vocabulary
• learn new vocabulary every day in our lessons
• have lots of resources in our classrooms to help us expand our vocabulary
• ‘hook’ our children with immersive experiences to help develop vocabulary and inspire a love for writing

 

Cohesion

At Moss Hall we…

• are taught how to use a range of cohesive devices to help structure our work
• have writing targets to help us express our ideas in a way that the reader will understand
• make sure we understand the basics before increasing the complexity of our writing
• learn new grammar and ways to vary our sentence structures through what we read
• practise and apply everything we have learnt from the models we study in our independent writing

 

Independent writing

At Moss Hall we…

• build up our writing skills by reading widely and sharing ideas
• practise and apply our new writing skills in short bursts
• ‘magpie’ ideas from the high-quality models that we have been exposed to

 

 

Editing and redrafting

At Moss Hall we...

• use green pens to edit our work so we can clearly see our changes
• read back through what we have written carefully to check that it makes sense and to check for errors
• redraft parts of our work to improve the reader’s experience

 

 

 

Assessment 

At Moss Hall we...

• self and peer assess our writing against specific criteria
• aim to use the age-appropriate grammar from the national curriculum in our writing
• moderate the standard of our writing across year groups and with other schools
• respond to verbal and written feedback from our teachers and include it in our writing next time