Writing
Intent
The CUSP writing curriculum has been designed as a progressive, coherent yet flexible curriculum, which aims to extend, enrich and consolidate the learning of grammatical and compositioanal features to improve outcomes. Retrieval practice is used to solidify these new features for children to begin to use these independently in subsequent lessons.
Implementation
Expert subject knowledge is carefully woven into each Writing unit, giving teachers the opportunity to teach and rehearse key knowledge and skills before children then apply this learning to meaningful, extended pieces of writing. This careful architecture of the curriculum ensures pupils revisit different writing genres twice in each year, to maximise the opportunities for progression and consolidate their skills, so they become writers for life. Within the CUSP curriculum, punctuation and grammar is taught both directly and discretely enabling children to see how it is embedded in example texts and then given the opportunity to apply this to their own writing.
In Year 1 through Year 4, children can also access sentence composition suites, which give explicit models for accurate, interesting and purposeful writing.
In each unit of work, children are exposed to high quality models before beginning to use these as scaffolds to write their own.
Each lesson is set within the familiar, My Turn, Our Turn, Your Turn structure.
Each units provides:
- A knowledge organiser, where children can see examples and definitions of the vocabulary and skills they will need to apply to be successful in the unit.
- A knowledge note for each session, to show examples specific to the skills being taught.
- Opportunities to see skills applied within a text and being modelled through high-quality teaching.
- Opportunities to work collaboratively, produce shared writing and build confidence to apply skills independently.
- A model text, which is used as an example of grammatical structures, vocabulary, presentation and organisation, but most of all used to frame children’s thinking, building their confidence and competence when writing.
- ‘Ingredients for success’ checklists which allow children to provide examples of where they have applied the skills they have learnt.
Impact
Our writing curriculum is of a high quality and ensures there is a clear progression. In order to measure the impact, we gather a variety of data to ensure learning has occurred and progress has been made. This information directly informs future planning and learning opportunities, allowing us to be responsive to the needs of our pupils. We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- Formative assessment in writing lessons which may include verbal feedback or written suggestions for improvement;
- Ingredients for Success checklists;
- Moderation within and between classes and local schools;
- Children are competent, fluent writers.
