SPaG
Vision
And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
Through the teachings of Jesus, all can flourish spiritually, emotionally and academically throughout life, living out love and justice for all. Our Christian values of love, justice, compassion, wisdom, forgiveness and friendship underpin the life of the school community and impact on our daily lives. Guilden Sutton Church of England Primary School strives to provide the best possible education for our children. We aim for excellence within our happy, secure school where each individual’s achievements are valued and celebrated. By using a holistic approach, we will provide a curriculum that offers a diverse and challenging environment to inspire and motivate every child in our care.
Intent
At Guilden Sutton Church of England Primary School, we intend to create successful writers who can re-read, edit and improve their writing. We strive to enable children to be able to confidently use the essential skills of grammar, punctuation and spelling. We believe we can achieve this by providing an engaging English curriculum to develop and enhance the progression of these essential skills and we provide opportunities across the rest of the curriculum to transfer these skills successfully.
Implementation
We believe that learning phonics provides young readers with the most direct route to skilled reading. We use the Essential Letters and Sounds programme to enable children to begin successfully decoding words using synthetic phonics. Phonics is taught daily through whole-class, short and highly interactive sessions and is then reinforced and applied across the curriculum. Once children can successfully decode words to read them, they can begin encoding to write a word with the correct spelling. Additionally, phonics sessions are used to teach common exception words.
As children move into Year 2 and through Key Stage 2, they take part in spelling sessions. We use No Nonsense Spelling to support the teaching of key spelling rules and patterns. Children are taught effective strategies for learning, remembering, understanding and applying these rules and patterns. Weekly spelling investigations are sent home to investigate other words including the same spelling rule or patterns. Children also complete a weekly spelling test to assess whether they can successfully apply their understanding.
The high-quality texts used across the whole curriculum are carefully selected to provide opportunities to teach grammar and punctuation skills both discreetly and as standalone lessons in line with the expectations of the National Curriculum. It is taught progressively across the whole school, building upon the children’s knowledge, consolidating what they know and applying it to the rest of their work.
We believe that children should learn to become independent editors of their own work. From Key Stage 1, children begin learning the skills to effectively edit their own work and support their peers when editing too. We recognise that the editing process involves children drawing upon everything they have learnt and we begin this process by providing time to reflect and we teach children how to edit by focusing on a different editing skill, including SPaG. As children progress into Key Stage 2, the skills of editing become increasingly embedded and children complete this task with increased independence.
At Guilden Sutton, we identify those individuals who need support and we provide a bespoke package of support. We strive to make them independent learners who are equipped with the confidence, tools and strategies they need.
Impact
Assessment in writing and SPaG is ongoing and teachers carry out in-depth assessment of children’s independent writing regularly across a breadth of genres. Children are actively involved in this process and engage in discussion with the class teacher about the outcomes they have achieved, whilst using their assessment to inform their own personalised targets for writing.
Progress across all classes is closely monitored by the subject leader and senior leadership team. Writing in children’s books, learning walks, pupil voice interviews and regular, focused learning walks provide opportunity to monitor the application of SPaG knowledge and skills whilst gathering evidence of good practice which is then used to facilitate future planning.
As children transition into secondary school, we aspire that they are able to write clearly and accurately and that they can adapt their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. Our children will have acquired a wide vocabulary and have a strong command of the written word. Most importantly, they will have developed a love of writing with skills that can be transferred across the whole curriculum.