English

At Whyteleafe School, we aim to inspire a passion for all aspects of English: writing, reading, listening and speaking and through this, we continuously encourage our children to develop their own unique writing style. As the children go through the school, their writing skills will develop as they access a variety of different purposeful genres that are carefully chosen to complement the curriculum, with children gaining an awareness of the different styles of writing for a variety of audiences. 

 

Using The Write Stuff framework, we focus on building the children’s confidence with sentence structure and their organisation of ideas, as well as cohesion between them. This is done through the teaching sequence that includes experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of sentence stacking lessons, learning is broken down into bite-sized chunks, which means that it is accessible for all children, including SEND and vulnerable children, and taught under the structural framework of ‘The Writing Rainbow’. We prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing, exposing them to a wide range of rich vocabulary and providing opportunities to develop their oracy. 

 

There are independent writing opportunities at the end of each unit, where the children should be able to reflect their understanding of the audience and purpose of their writing by selecting appropriate vocabulary and grammar, applying previously learnt concepts and are encouraged to apply their learning more deeply. These provide the teacher with an opportunity to assess the children's understanding. This is done through conferencing, where the children have the opportunity to develop their oracy skills further by reading their work to their teacher and being provided with instant verbal feedback. 

 

What is ‘The Writing Rainbow’?

The Writing Rainbow is the essential component to ensuring that children can gather and organise their ideas: it provides the children with the choice of different literary elements that can be used to construct all writing, both narrative and non-fiction.

 

The FANTASTIC lenses help children to prepare language and organise it under nine clear headings. 

 

The GRAMMARISTIC lenses are in individual tool, as they outline and cover the national curriculum requirements, as well as providing a broad hook so pupils can deliver sentences that one of the grammar strands. 

 

The BOOMTASTIC lenses are literary devices, which are a way to make the familiar seem new and a powerful descriptive tool to lift writing off the page.