At Mawnan School, English is at the heart of everything we do.
Our English vision is to foster a love of language and literature through the use of high-quality texts and picture books to inspire, excite and engage our children.
Through rich vocabulary, discussion and an oracy-focused approach, we envisage our children cultivating the necessary skills to enable them to make sense of the world, connect ideas and express themselves with confidence.
Our curriculum is driven by a broad range of high-quality texts which provide stimulus for reading, writing and oracy and aim to deliver an opportunity for all to be immersed in a rich literary voyage; one which captures a sense of adventure, leaves children wanting to explore more and evokes a genuine love of language and the written word.
Careful curriculum design has meant that strong links are made across all areas of the curriculum. This ensures that children’s English learning is relevant and meaningful: where possible, we link our reading, writing and expedition curriculum so that our children recognise themselves writing as geographers, historians and scientists.
At Mawnan, we believe:
We believe that every child has the potential to be a gifted writer.
Our intentions in writing are for our children to:
How is English Taught?
English is taught through a sequential journey which encourages children to read like a writer and write like a reader. We take a diagnostic approach which enables targeted learning and challenge for all. Through careful curriculum design, our writing links to our wider expedition learning to ensure that children’s English learning is relevant and meaningful.
Early Years Writing
At Mawnan School, we begin phonics from the very first day in Reception. The daily phonics scheme sequentially introduces letter formation with each phoneme introduced, putting sounds together (blending), as well as teaching children to listen for the individual sounds in words (segmenting) - a vital skill in spelling. Spelling and letter formation, including hand grip and posture, are taught alongside phonics in the early stages.
Writing is modelled (single words at first), at the phonics stage they are being taught. The teacher models sounding out all the sounds they hear in words and writing as they hear them in a similar way to a phonics lesson.
As phase 3 phonics sounds are revisited and the children's confidence increases, the dictation element of the lesson also increases, progressing from words to short sentences including simple high frequency non-decodable words.
By the Spring term, the children have been taught all the phase 2 and 3 sounds. Simple sentences are modelled and the children become more independent; this will involve articulating their own ideas in speech before writing. Sound cards (and their associated image) which are linked to the phonics scheme are consistently referred to and used for reference by pupils and staff to encourage greater accuracy in spelling.
Our continuous provision and experiences both within and beyond the classroom, provide additional and meaningful opportunities to inspire our children to put their early writing skills into action and to write for a purpose.
Particular attention is also paid to providing opportunities for the development of gross and fine motor movements - all crucial for the developmental stages needed for writing.
Mark making and writing opportunities are deepened throughout our writing lessons. These then evolve further through the pupils' independent practise: our successful continuous provision provides every child's writing the opportunity to shine!
The Key Stage 1 and 2 Writing Journey
The Place Value of Grammar
The whole school starts the academic year with ‘the place value of grammar’. These terms are your tens and ones of punctuation and grammar! Our systematic approach to teaching grammar is logical and enables concepts to be re-visited and built upon.
The Writing Process
We aim to explore 1 - 2 genres of writing per half term through our 5-step approach.
Step 1 - Diagnostic:
What do we know?
AFL (Assessment for Learning) is at the heart of our writing process. Therefore, our initial step is a form of diagnostic task. The diagnostic task is an opportunity for the children to show what they already know and can apply to the text type. This could include a spelling activity, a grammar/vocabulary check or a short burst write to check paragraphing and cohesion. If the children are about to embark on an unfamiliar genre, this may be a concept task. This diagnostic is then used to plot out the areas of learning in the contextualized construction phase.
Step 2 - Text Deconstruction:
Understand
The writing journey always begins with reading. Here, the children are immersed in a rich diet of genre-specific texts or extracts which provide high-quality models of the writing outcome of a unit. The aim of these lessons is to unpick and analyse a text to securely understand what components come together to make that text type unique. Here we decide the purpose of the text: whether it be to entertain, inform, persuade or to discuss. We look at how the text is presented, with focus on the effect a layout can have on a reader. The children are also encouraged to question the authors choices around vocabulary and language features to analyse how these impact the tone, atmosphere and lasting impression of a text. In KS2, this is supported further by comparing texts to find similarities and differences.
In KS1, this may take a more Talk for Writing approach where the class will learn to retell a model text through a story map and learn to read as a writer through drama, games and boxing up a text.
Step 3 - Contextualized Construction:
Have a go
Once the children have a solid grasp of the text-type that is being studied, we move to shared writing stage. Here, we model the process of planning, ‘thinking like a writer’, and the skills of editing to build up a shared class text. Based on formative assessment, this sequence of lessons is a balance of skills and application, designed to improve the craft of sentence structure, vocabulary work and to hone punctuation skills. This enables the children to be explicitly taught grammar and punctuation in a contextual setting, giving instant opportunities to apply new learning.
Step 4 - Reconstruction:
Create
Our create stage gives our children the opportunity to really get their creative juices flowing and apply their learning to a new context. This could be writing a non-chronological report about a new species they’ve discovered, creating their own setting description for somewhere new, a work of fiction or maybe writing a letter about something they feel passionately about!Step 5 - Assess and Feedback:
What did we do well?
Although feedback is woven throughout all stages of the writing process, we use the class’s independent writing to assess against age-related expectations. Through doing this we have valuable discussions to celebrate what each child is doing successfully and the next steps of their writing journey.
Our children’s initial spelling journey begins with phonics. Once children are secure in the grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) for each set of sounds and they are able to segment and blend, they are ready to move to our spellings scheme.
Our fidelity is with the Spelling Shed scheme/curriculum as it is a research-based scheme which aligns with our pedagogical approach, covers the national curriculum spellings and is progressive.
As well as explicitly teaching spelling patterns, we use phonics as a base and have explicit opportunities to teach morphology, etymology and activities that support orthographic mapping.
Each week the children will start by revisiting sounds and spelling patterns from earlier weeks in the scheme. They will then explore the words of the week, examining aspects such as the number of syllables, tricky sounds and the morphology of the words.
Spelling Shed also provides an online platform which offers children a highly engaging way of practising spellings as well as opportunities for assessment.
We believe in the importance of clear and neat presentation in order to communicate effectively. We teach handwriting progressively across the school using Nelson Handwriting to develop automaticity and fluency of writing.
Pupils should be able to write legibly in both joined and printed styles with increasing fluency and speed by:
Let’s Think in English (LTE) is a teaching programme which helps pupils develop oracy and the higher-order skills needed for success in English.
These include inference, deduction and analysis together with confidence and resilience when responding to unfamiliar texts.
Let’s Think in English draws on research by Piaget and Vygotsky that young people learn best when exploring ideas together. The lessons are based on structured challenge and include the development of understanding through discussion (social construction), problem-solving (cognitive challenge) and structured reflection (metacognition) which makes pupils more aware of their thinking processes and how they think most effectively.
The Let’s Think In English program forms a part of both our reading and writing. The programme consists of high-interest lessons all using English texts – fiction, poetry, non-fiction and film. We plan to teach 2 LTE lessons per half term which involve reading, open-ended questioning and structured group discussion.They systematically develop pupils’ skills of inference, deduction and analysis, increasing their confidence, resilience, understanding and ability to express their ideas.