Vision: At Folly View Primary School we strive for all our children to be inspired, successful and confident writers. We focus on phonics, high quality texts and teaching as our basis to develop every child as an independent writer.

FROM THE CHILDREN:

 “I loved it when we made storybooks. Well actually, I like everything in literacy.” Year 1.

“I always use the sound and words to help me when I am writing.” NB from year 1.

“Our WILD book was the best! I could make my own book with my own story.” CC from year 2.

“I have enjoyed drawing and labelling stone age objects because it was lots of new words to learn.” AC from year 3.

FROM THE LITERACY LEADS:

Hello, I am Mrs Gidlow, the KS1 English Lead at Folly View Primary School. It is fantastic working with the staff to continually plan and develop our curriculum for the needs of the children here. We work hard to base our learning on high quality and engaging texts that challenge and enthuse all pupils. In our learning, we enjoy exploring and improving to make progress every step of the way.

Hi, I am Mrs Newby the KS2 English Lead. At Folly View, we believe that writing is a wonderful way to express your thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Our goal is to help every student become a confident writer. Whether you're working on a story, a poem, or a report, we have lots of fun activities and helpful tips to guide you. Remember, writing is a journey, and every word you write brings you one step closer to becoming a great writer. Let's explore the magic of words together!

Long Term Plan

The long term plans outline the sequence of writing topics and skills to be taught within each year group and aligns with the National Curriculum. It ensures children progressively build upon their writing knowledge and skills throughout their learning journey within literacy.

Early Writers

Children need to be able to think and speak well before they can compose ideas in a way that they can write down. Listening to, learning by heart and reciting stories (or sections of them) allows children to internalise the sort of language they might later need to try writing a story of their own ('Once upon a time' or 'All of a sudden' or 'Happily ever after'!). Role Play, small world play (with farm animals, puppets or dolls houses) and drama games allow them to practice putting words together to tell 'stories' which help them embed story language. 

At Folly View Primary, we are committed to the importance of all our learners having opportunities to speak, role play and recite before, and alongside writing. We also recognise that being able to write in different forms means that children will need to have experience of lots of different forms of writing. We promote a language rich environment where children can see, hear and find, labels, signs and posters, poems and rhymes, information books and stories of all types.

To begin recording children need to have developed the fine motor skills necessary to manipulate the tools to record. We enjoy a wide range of activities to support children in holding and using writing resources. 

As we begin to write, we follow the RWI method to help us with spellings.

Teaching writing in Key Stage one and Key Stage Two.

At Folly View, writing is taught following the Hampshire Model for Writing which takes children on a learning journey of studying a quality text and the key features needed to produce their own work. There are three main sections to each unit and children are involved in knowing the journey to support their progress.

The three key areas:  

•Stimulate and Generate

•Capture, Sift and Sort

•Create, Refine and Evaluate

Stimulate and Generate- Read as a Reader

In this phase, we always begin with an exciting and motivating ‘hook’. The children have an experience linked to the text and it is marked this on the start of their journey of work. This is followed by drama and gathering activities to deepen the children’s understanding of the text. We include a ‘Flashback’ write to link writing from previous learning to the new text to help us retain and demonstrate our continual progression of learning.

Capture, Sift and Sort- Read as a Writer

Within this section, we study a WAGOLL (what a good one looks like) to support our understanding of a successful piece of writing in this genre. Through careful modelling and independent writing opportunities we develop our skills as writers by applying our learning. These 'Apprentice Writes' offer supported writing for the children to apply their newly taught features that will support them with their final write.
 

Create, Refine and Evaluate- Write as a Writer

Our final stage ensures all children have time to plan, draft and edit their work. When planning children are encouraged to apply existing and newly taught skills and consider their identified audience. They use planning to write a draft piece in a focussed and motivating environment. Afterwards, children are supported to further develop their work with focussed editing. Our unit comes to a close with time for publishing which can be in a number of forms from illustrating the work someone has written to performing to others.