Writing at All Saint’s uses the All Saints’ approach: Engage, Skill-building and create.Evaluate to help pupils coordinate the processes of text generation, transcription and executive functions in their working memory.

Engage: During this stage information is gathered, prior knowledge activated, and exemplar texts are read to identify key features and consider the writing style used.

• Vocabulary is explicitly taught by delivering a planned approach to explaining words with a meaningful, repeated exposure to them.
• Pupils ‘box-up’ texts to internalise the structure, to internalise a sense of structure in their own writing.
• The teacher demonstrates reading the stimulus text as a writer through stylistic analysis. Teachers model how to scour the text for key features including genre and specific vocabulary, figurative language, punctuation, and grammatical devices. The effect of these features on the reader is consistently explored.
• Pupils interact with the language patterns using story/text maps, so they become deeply embedded, adding the language patterns into their linguistic competency.
• Drama is often used as a key strategy to help pupils deepen their imaginative engagement with a story/text.

Skill-Building: Short bursts of writing is planned to build the children’s confidence to use the vocabulary & skills from the toolkit precisely in their writing. Writing strategies are explicitly taught using the ‘gradual release of responsibility’ model. Initially, the teacher models these sentence construction techniques, but pupils then go on to work collaboratively and independently. Pupils learn to construct increasingly sophisticated sentences, for meaning and effect, with speed. During these Skill-Building lessons, teachers also use speaking and listening activities to model and develop expressive and receptive language: articulating ideas before writing and listening activities to develop inference skills without the need to process the written text. High quality classroom discussion further supports pupils to articulate key ideas, consolidate understanding, and extend their vocabulary.

Create.Evaluate: Pupils first plan their writing, before completing their first draft. Finally, pupils edit making changes to ensure the text is accurate and coherent. During this process, teachers model thinking out loud, editing and demonstrate how and why they have structured their writing in the way that they have.

The Approach below follows on from the approach taken in Early Years- click here to find out more.

All Saints Approach to Writing in KS1 & 2

The writing skills within each of the phases above (Engage, Skill-building, Create-Evaluate) need to be explicitly taught using the ‘gradual release of responsibility’ model. This can be repeated for each strategy. However, pupils will inevitably learn the strategies at different rates, so it’s important to recognise that the model is not a linear process.