Intent

At Nansen, we recognise that writing is integral to all aspects of life and we mindfully endeavour to ensure that children develop a lifelong, healthy and enthusiastic attitude towards writing.

‘Young people, like adults, write to communicate, to make meaning, to sustain and negotiate relationships and to get things done. In the process they portray themselves in specific ways.’ Cremin, T. (2016)

By recognising and nurturing all children as writers, creating a stimulating writing environment, employing appropriate resources and pedagogies, we are determined to provide all pupils with an exciting and meaningful writing curriculum which will allow learners to recognise their full potential and develop their:

We use a carefully selected spine of books to underpin our curriculum, develop vocabulary and inspire engaging writing lessons. Our children consistently have access to high-quality texts by a range of authors throughout their time at Nansen Primary. 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 Nansen we…

• use the Letter join handwriting scheme 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
• support our children to segment, blend and recognise spelling rules.

Vocabulary

At Nansen we...

• challenge ourselves to use interesting and precise vocabulary
• learn new vocabulary every day in our lessons
• have resources in our classrooms to help us expand our vocabulary
• ‘hook’ our children with high-quality texts to help develop vocabulary and inspire a love for reading and writing.

Cohesion

At Nansen Primary we…

• teach how to use a range of cohesive devices to help structure our work
• have writing targets (TAFs) 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 Nansen Primary 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 Nansen Primary we encourage our children...
• to use purple pens to edit their work so they can clearly see changes
• read back through what they have written carefully to check that it makes sense and to check for errors
• redraft parts of their work to improve the reader’s experience.

Assessment

At Nansen Primary 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 within our Trust schools and other schools
• respond to verbal and written feedback from our teachers and include it in our writing next time.