At Norfolk Community Primary School we believe that children need good models of writing to support them to produce their own high-quality work. Therefore we follow invest a lot of time exploring WAGOLL examples and developing writing skills. Children complete extended pieces of writing by planning (through discussion of key success criteria), drafting, editing and publishing.

We also use The Write Stuff and  ‘The Power of Reading’ to teach writing as it allows us to use engaging stories as inspiration and a starting point for the children’s writing.

We teach grammar within the context of what we are writing, often exploring real-life examples from published authors to understand how they have manipulated grammar to make their writing effective and interesting.

At Norfolk, in Early Years and Key Stage 1, we incorporate the Talk for Writing model into the teaching of writing. Children are taught writing skills through studying a range of both fiction and non-fiction texts including teacher produced models. Children are encouraged and supported to learn texts by heart, before trying to innovate them and gradually apply more independent changes to the model until they can write freely with confidence. In addition, in Key Stage 1, picture books and topic work are used as a stimulus for writing. In Key Stage 2, children are taught to write through Novel Study and through cross-curricular links. All of their writing is inspired by novels and they study six novels per academic year. Challenging texts are chosen to ensure that children have an excellent model for their own writing.

During their time at Norfolk, children are given opportunities to write for a range of purposes and audiences, given them exposure to circumstances where they need to adapt their vocabulary and overall formality to suit the purpose of what they are writing.

Throughout the 2018-2019 academic year, the KS2 teaching staff were part of a SSIF writing project with a team of other local schools focussing on embedding contextualised grammar into their writing teaching. This principle underpins the teaching of grammar, ensuring that real-life, high quality texts are used to demonstrate how grammar has been effectively used to influence writing.