Writing for Purpose

At Franciscan we teach children to write for a purpose, whether it be stories shared with other classes, letters written to locals or writing from a character’s point of view.

Our approach to writing is built around a range of exciting and diverse core texts, linked to our termly Franciscan Projects. We immerse children in a rich literary world, fostering strong engagement and providing meaningful contexts for learning primary English. Through this Teach Through a Text approach, children become critical readers and develop an understanding of audience and purpose in writing, as they encounter a wide range of significant authors and diverse texts, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Our curriculum provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary. as well as spelling. We engage pupils with a ‘hook’ into the text and then teach grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and text construction, though the text. Pupils are taught to identify the key features of successful works, before planning, structuring and writing their own. We always use models, working through these so children understand what good writing looks and sounds like. After generating appropriate vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structures, we then guide pupils through the craft of creating successful writing. Children are encouraged to edit and redraft their pieces to produce high quality work.

Rather than over-testing spellings, we carefully teach spelling which is closely linked to the children’s growing knowledge of phonics. Children in Year 2 upwards are taught the wonder of words, by looking for patterns, investigating rules and applying and re-applying their knowledge in different ways.

We teach cursive ‘Franciscan handwriting’ from nursery upwards, meaning pupils leave our school with neat, joined handwriting.

Articulate Pupils

We value the art of articulacy, and aim to give our pupils the opportunity to become confident and eloquent public speakers.

We do this in a number of ways, including:

• Opportunities within our English curriculum and across other subjects to formulate ideas, speak out loud (including publicly) and debate with others.

• Project outcomes which often include opportunities for public speaking - past examples have included poetry recitals, museum audio guides, tour guides of the local area and exhibition explainers.

• An integrated French curriculum which values speaking from nursery upwards.

• Public speaking opportunities in assemblies.

• School council elections, campaigns, and debates.

• Public performances in EYFS, Y2, Y3 and a full musical at the end of Year 6.