Through our knowledge-engaged curriculum, our pupils will acquire both knowledge and skills through our carefully thought-out curriculum, which is line with the National Curriculum. We have also carefully mapped out our high-quality texts in unison with our reading approach to ensure pupils are infused with a rich literature library by the end of year 6.

Our pupils will acquire their knowledge and skills through these key concepts (golden threads). These concepts will progressively develop through our mixed-year classes and build on knowledge and skills to promote our knowledge-engaged curriculum. These are the key concepts, that as writers, we want our pupils to keep coming back to ensure they have flexible mental models of knowledge to take with them in their next stage of the learning journey and beyond.

Objectives and End Points:

Our pupils deserve to be enriched with knowledge and develop flexible, transferable skills that they can apply across the curriculum and in future learning and beyond. As a school, we have a clear structure and progression to ensure that our pupils are successful in meeting their end points in each key concept; ensuring they have the skills and knowledge ready for their next steps.

As writers, our pupils will:

• Become infused with new and ambitious vocabulary, understanding the relationships between words, how to understand nuances in meaning, and how to develop their understanding of, and ability to use, figurative language.
• Know how to work out and clarify the meanings of unknown words and words with more than one meaning.
• Be equipped with the skills to control their speaking and writing consciously and to use Standard English.  
• To have a fundamental knowledge and skills for grammar, as stated in the National Curriculum.
• Engage with core texts that will both value and confirm pupils linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds and introduce them to cultural and social contexts beyond those they are familiar with.
• Be infused with high-quality literature that promotes inquisitive thinking around themes and concepts; and use their love for reading to infuse passion into their writing.
• Be able to communicate ideas and organise them coherently by demonstrating clarity, awareness of audience, purpose and context and an increasing wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.
• Expand their horizons by writing with a purpose and write for a range of audiences.
• Develop their own authentic writing voices, experiencing how through writing they can communicate with others, express themselves and cultivate identity, an understanding of the world and their place in it in relation to others.
• Be confident and fluent in writing, spelling, and spoken language.
• Become equipped with the skills and knowledge to become confidently literate.
• Promote opportunities to allow pupils to become inquisitive and use this as inspiration for writing opportunities that are not only available explicitly, but that are also nurtured and weaved throughout the curriculum: providing meaningful contexts and enriching their learning with a range of authors.
• Understand the writing process and be able to plan, write, edit, revise, and evaluate their writing.
• Understand spelling rules and patterns and apply these in their writing and through knowing the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) and understanding the morphology (word structure) and orthography (spelling structure) of words.
• Develop a handwriting style that is legible, fluent, and cursive, in line with the National Curriculum.

Teaching and Learning:

At Burrowmoor Primary Academy, our writing units are based around the planning provided by Pathways to Write. This is our core spine: it can be enhanced through the provision of additional learning platforms as we recognise differences between our cohorts. This can include Grammarsaurus, Literacy Shed Plus and Vocabulary Ninja.

Each unit of work is expected to last 6-7 weeks, with the integration of half-time and full-time writes. These are independent writes where the children apply the skills learnt to outcomes that are personal, purposeful and provide opportunities to deepen their ability as a writer. The knowledge and skills are the core drive to the lessons. Pathways to Write follows a Mastery-Learning model. Key skills are taught and repeated; there are multiple opportunities throughout each unit to use and apply the skills until they can be mastered fully. Within each sequence, there are many opportunities for incidental short- burst writing with an extended written outcome built up to by the end of each unit. The teaching and learning units follow the same sequence:

1. The Gateway
2. The Pathway
3. The Writeaway

The Gateway refers to opportunities to hook the pupils into the context of learning and to assess previously taught mastery skills. A short writing task (Kick-off) is set at the end of this session to assess the application of Gateway skills (non-negotiable previously taught objectives).

The Pathway refers to the mastery skills are introduced with many opportunities to practise and apply these skills in different writing tasks. The tasks use genres that the pupils will be most familiar with such as character or setting descriptions, dialogue, diary entries, instructions, poetry, and sentence work, providing a range of on-going evidence for writing assessment. This is where we also utilising enhancing grammar opportunities.

The Writeaway refers to the final section and begins with sectioning and sequencing texts using a model. Within the Writeaway, pupils are encouraged to plan, write, check, edit and re-draft as required with the focus on using and applying the mastery skills they have been taught. Embedded within the gateway keys are the feature keys. These are the features of the writing genre that is the outcome for each unit. Each set of feature keys has the same structure – vocabulary of the genre, how sentences and tenses are used and the overall structure of each one.

EYFS

Reception are an integral part to our writing journey at Burrowmoor Primary Academy. We use a graduated approach, which builds towards the use of Pathways to Write in the summer term. In Autumn and Spring term, there are two intertwined approaches to writing within our reception class: the quality texts from PKC (The Primary Knowledge Curriculum) which promotes oracy, imagination and develops vocabulary; and our SSP Floppy’s Phonics, which equips the children with the knowledge and skills that are needed for writing and support the transition into our whole school scheme in the summer term, ensuring readiness for Year 1. The progression is clearly planned across the year and in line with the whole-school approach. At Burrowmoor we understand that learning in early years is not linear and does not take place in a set 15 x 1-hour sessions. We strongly believe that reception play an integral part of in our pupils successfully achieving that intended end points.  Prior to this, in our nursery pupils are also exposed to high-quality texts from PKC and alongside reception, the focus is on developing oracy skills as well as the physical skills needed to write. These include core strength; gross motor; fine motor leading to an appropriate pencil grip. This is in line with the intended outcomes in the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.