Yew Tree Community School

Yew Tree: Purpose for Writing

Our Collective Writing Mission

At Yew Tree Community School we want every one of our children to:

• Have a love of writing.
• Understand the different purposes for writing and their audiences.
• Be able to write, edit, improve and publish their work with pride.
• Be creative. independent writers, who select the appropriate features for effect.
• Understand the relevance of writing to themselves and their future lives.
• Achieve their full  potential.

The ‘Purpose for Writing Approach’: Rationale

At Yew Tree we have a ’Purpose for Writing’ approach. Rather than trying to teach children a plethora of different genres yearly, our new approach focusses on what those different genres have in common: the purpose for writing.

Although the purposes of writing are prescriptive, the order in which we complete them is up to staff in each year group, using their knowledge of the curriculum drivers and assessment of their children. We aim to spend longer on each unit to ensure that concepts are really grasped. By the end of the half-term, two pieces of writing will have been completed by pupils in each year group.

The purpose led approach to writing better prepares pupils to recognise different genres and which purpose they are linked to: they are not a distinct type themselves to be taught in isolation. For example, instead of seeing newspapers as newspapers and biographies as biographies, children will begin to recognise both as texts with the same purpose. Pupils are then more likely to identify specific text features and structures, grammar and sentence structures, word level and choice and punctuation, that cross between the two genres being taught.

Therefore, children do not have to scrap everything they learnt and start a completely new purpose: they are able to use their recently taught knowledge to help build on different genres and retain the different aspects of the purpose for writing.

In addition, this will result in less ‘jumping around’ between genres and allowing us to take time to secure key objectives with pupils, which will help improve outcomes in pupils’ work and improve retention of new knowledge and learning.

We want all children at Yew Tree to have a fully developed understanding of writing purposes and that they are excited and engaged so that they have a life-long love for writing.

The four purposes to write being taught at Yew Tree are:

• To ENTERTAIN
• To INFORM
• To PERSUADE
• To DISCUSS

Below are the purposes focussed upon at different points in the school.

• KS1 – Entertain and inform.
• LKS2 – Entertain, inform and persuade
• UKS2 – Entertain, inform, persuade and discuss.

Purpose for Writing Long Term Plans

Spelling

Rationale

At Yew Tree, we firmly believe that accurate spelling is an essential skill, that allows our children to communicate their understanding effectively across all curriculum areas. We equip our children with a range of effective strategies in order to spell with independence in all of their writing. We want our children to develop a love of language and the confidence to spell accurately as well as more ambitious and challenging vocabulary.

The spelling scheme below outlines the expectations for each Key Stage. 

Handwriting

Rationale

At Yew Tree, we want our pupils to strive for ‘perfect presentation’.

We want all of our children to take great pride in their handwriting and the presentation in all of their books. Children will develop a confident, continuous cursive handwriting style by the end of Year 4, which they continue to use fluently and effectively in Year 5 and Year 6. They will use their developed handwriting style in all lessons aiming to produce ‘perfect presentation’ across our curriculum.

Handwriting Expectations for Year groups