The Writing Cycle - Child Version

The Writing Cycle - Adult Version

The writing cycle begins with collecting the children’s prior knowledge of the particular genre being studied. We move on to finding features of the genre, then carry out a reading comprehension lesson using a WAGOLL, then the following lessons are ones which are explicitly teaching pupils the skills needed to write an independent assessed piece at the end of the unit. We incorporate oracy skills throughout each unit. The independent writing is assessed using target sheets for the specific year group curriculum the pupils are working at. A sample of these are shown below:

Sample of assessment grids Year 3

Sample of assessment Grid Year 5

We aim to expand the children’s vocabulary through the ‘Word of the week’ display in the hall and vocabulary lists are kept in English books where children can collect exiting vocabulary they want to remember. Each day, we begin our English lessons with a ‘Daily Fluency’ task which helps the children to practice and remember punctuation and grammar rules. Spelling is carried out four times per week and is taught using a range of activities to learn specific patterns.

Handwriting

Handwriting (Kinetic Letters) is carried out 4 times per week from 9.35-9.45. Our new handwriting scheme called Kinetic Letters! Kinetic Letters is a programme which teaches children how to form letters quickly, correctly and with confidence. We build on the handwriting strategies that the children have learnt at infant school through the Kinetic Letters approach. The letters are split up into families which help the pupils to correctly form each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, with the aim of creating ‘automaticity’ which will result in the children being able to write automatically and only having to think about ‘what’ they’re writing, not ‘how’ they’re writing it! Please see some information about the letter families below:

Letter Families

Spellings 

We teach spellings 4 times per week here at WWJS. As part of their homework, we ask that children practise these at home.