Our Intent

Our vision at Harston and Newton Community Primary School is to give every child the opportunity to become a writer and be excited by writing. We believe that high expectations and encouragement will create a confident and capable writer. We want our children to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. We believe it is important for all children to be exposed to quality writing texts and given the time to reflect upon their writing and the writing of others. Children at Harston and Newton will develop the tools they need to become a proficient writer and develop a genuine love of writing.

What does writing look like at Harston and Newton?

The Teach Through a Text approach

At Harston and Newton, we place a quality text at the centre of each unit of work to act as a focus for the learning.  This immersion into the literary world helps to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for learning.  We plan units of work for the children (usually for two or three weeks), incorporating the teaching and learning of different skills leading up to a purposeful writing outcome. As part of the sequence of learning, children continue to develop their critical reading skills and acquire different writing voices as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors as well as a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry anchor texts. We make deliberate links to previous units of work – both within the year and to previous ones – to ensure that children continue to build and further develop key objectives and skills in different contexts.  To support this further, as a school, we have decided to anchor our teaching to writing upon six writing purposes as suggested by Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson in their book Real-World Writers: A Handbook for Teaching Writing with 7-11 Year Olds (2020).  Here they suggest that there six major reasons that children are moved to write, the “Writing Purposes”: to entertain, to teach, to persuade, to reflect, to paint with words and to make a record.  We begin to introduce these concepts in Reception and build upon them as children move through school.  They help to support the understanding of the importance of purpose and audience within writing.  

 Within each unit of work, children are provided with opportunities to:

• read a model text and discuss collective responses to a text as readers;
• read the text as a writer, with the articulation of the thinking and creative processes involved in all stages of the act of writing;
• undertake Speaking and listening activities, e.g. role play, pair talk, drama and hot seating, where appropriate, to support understanding, develop creative responses and prepare children for the writing process
• be exposed to the specific teaching of the skills and complete sentence and word level work led by quality texts to develop grammatical awareness and punctuation skills required for the writing outcome;
• invent their own compositions for a specific audience and purpose;
• produce an extended piece of independent writing so they can practice the skills they have been taught.
• edit and improve their work
• begin to assess their own piece of writing against given success criteria or peer assess with a writing partner.

Writing Overviews for 2022-2023

Due to our flexible class structure, we carefully map out the wide range of texts that are shared with each cohort of children on their journey through Harston and Newton School.  We review this text-type provision on an annual basis.  The current English unit overview for this academic year (2022-2023) can be found below.