Vision
At Blackwater, we believe that firm foundations in reading and writing are key to educational success.
Our aim is to fill the days with opportunities for the children to be creative and inspired to write. We never put a ceiling on children's learning and have high expectations of them all as writers.
Our writing curriculum is closely tied to our learning across the curriculum, and usually written tasks are inspired by the class text, which children are immersed in through daily reading sessions. Our writing curriculum was created in partnership with Grammarsaurus and therefore is bespoke to our school.
We approach the teaching of writing with the understanding that it is complex and involves many aspects. As a result we teach handwriting, vocabulary and spelling outside the writing lesson. Grammar and punctuation are taught through shared writing and linked to the current writing unit.
The writing process at Blackwater is broken into four key stages. Central to this process is exposing the children to high-quality written texts on which to base their own written work. These texts are chosen to ensure that a wide variety of genres and styles are covered. Central to this process is the development of children’s vocabulary and their application of ambitious language into their own written work.
The four stages of writing are outlined below. These are displayed in the classrooms on writing working walls and communicated to the children at each stage so they are aware of the requirements of each lesson.
In key stage one, these stages are condensed into an individual daily lesson structure that will involve an element of text analysis, before moving on to shared writing and eventually an independent writing task.
Here is some information about how we teach spelling at Blackwater.
In Wheal Friendly and Wheal Harmony children are taught to spell through our phonics programme, Little Wandle.
Children are taught the sounds (phonemes) and how they are written (graphemes.) They then learn to apply what they have learned through daily practice.
In years 3 to 6, we follow the Spelling Shed programme for the teaching of spelling. Children are introduced to a new spelling rule weekly, they are taught the spelling rule and are then given opportunities to practise in class daily using a combination of Spelling Shed online and paper tasks.
Home learning
Children bring home their spellings for further practise. This may be as a paper task, the online Spelling Shed game from year 3, or a combination of both.
Children are quizzed on their weekly spellings in school.
In addition to spelling rules, children from year 1 to 6 are taught ‘tricky’ spellings which don’t follow a particular pattern. These can be found on our website:
