Teaching and LearningWriting
Text
Intent
At The Pines we enable all pupils to access a fun and exciting writing curriculum. The curriculum is progressive and relevant to children’s interests and needs and carefully builds on the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding. It encourages creative thought and mastery of the craft of writing to help to develop a love for creativity and writing. At The Pines School we are passionate that all children develop their writing ability to the full, through sensory experiences, first-hand experiences in real life settings and through motivating and fun writing activities across a number of different contexts to enable our learners to generalise their skills.
Implementation
At The Pines, writing is taught daily within each year group in accordance with the National Curriculum. Outcomes are carefully differentiated to the needs and abilities of the learners. Every learner is given opportunities to practise their writing skills across the curriculum.
For learners working below National Curriculum expectations, writing is often sensory based and aims to develop learner’s fine motor control, creativity and engagement to equip them for life after Pines. This is taught through Attention Autism, sensory explore and learn activities and key writing activities. Class staff provide a range of adult modelling, exciting and engaging activities and opportunities to practice writing through different mediums. We provide our learners with opportunities to practice prewriting skills to enable them to make steps towards writing readiness. Learners are also given opportunities to explore and experience letter shapes to enable them to begin making connections. Our learners take part in 1:1 writing activities to give them focussed experiences of writing. We also provide our learners with opportunities to think creatively through sensory stories based on key texts and role play. Even at these very early stages learners are exposed to narrative and non-fiction texts to help them experience writing in different forms.
For learners working at National Curriculum expectations, the curriculum is designed to raise standards but also to immerse our learners in a variety of imaginative and non-fiction writing. The exposure to a wide range of literary and non-fiction text offers them a rounded and exciting opportunity to develop their creativity and gives them a purpose for writing A huge emphasis is placed upon learning and understanding new vocabulary and writing organisation to enhance skills in writing which is taught through Word Aware vocabulary sessions, shared writing opportunities, creative writing, handwriting and spelling practice through Read, Write, Inc and opportunities to write for different purposes.
Writing for both pathways builds upon skills that have been learnt in the previous year which is clearly shown on the English Knowledge Overview.
Impact
The successful approach to teaching writing at The Pines results in a fun, engaging, high-quality writing education, that provides learners with the skills and knowledge they need in later life. Our practical, creative and well-planned curriculum ensures that our pupils learn through a differentiated approach so all learners reach their full potential. Our learners have the option to achieve qualifications in KS4 to allow them to further their skills in collages, sixth form or apprenticeships. When our learners leave The Pines they will have the skills they need to be able to access the community as independently as possible.