Here at Manor Wood, we understand that Reading and Writing are intrinsically linked and we teach in a way to support the development of both skills in unison, across the whole of school. In Early Years, this begins with our daily Phonics and carefully matched decodable texts for daily Reading sessions. In KS1 and KS2 we achieve this through our very own Literacy Process. Each Literacy unit begins with a reading focus where children build their reading skills and study a carefully selected quality text from our whole school studied text spine. These books have been chosen to develop progressively in complexity across school and to include both classics and modern classics, a range of authors and themes reflecting a diverse variety of backgrounds and identities and a broad spectrum of text types. Children are immersed fully in the text that they study; they explore, enjoy and analyse it before using it as inspiration for their own writing. Writing outcomes would not always be the same genre or text type as the studied text, but it would act as a hook into the themes and purposes for writing for that unit. A studied novel might lead to a narrative writing outcome, but in other units the purpose for writing might be to persuade, or inform. In those cases, WAGOLLs (model texts) are used to identify successful features for the children to use in their own writing. The writing process then begins with identifying a purpose and audience for their writing (for example a persuasive letter to a company or famous person, a magical story for adults, a diary entry, an informative leaflet for tourists), then opportunity to identify success criteria and key features to include for a successful text. After that, children practise the skills of writing different aspects of features and work on next steps. Children then plan, draft, edit and redraft their own piece of writing, before publishing for a real purpose. Physical Oracy is developed throughout school as part of these units, where performance of final pieces such as playscripts, news reports, podcasts and poetry are the end outcome for “publishing”.
See Phonics and Early Reading, Reading and Writing sections for more detail on each aspect.
In KS1 and KS2, each unit begins with a text study and entirely Reading-focused sessions. We select high quality texts (see our Studied Text Spine) as a hook for each of our Literacy units, and we teach vocabulary, fluency and comprehension skills using these texts. Drama and role-play are utilised as a way to immerse children in the text and to establish fluency and also gist and summarising skills. Children are able to apply their understanding to work around inference, retrieval, prediction, comparing the text to their wider reading, understanding words in context, giving viewpoints and justifying with evidence from the text, and analysing the authorial choices made in the piece. The Writing focus lessons then follow on, with children exploring text features, then planning, drafting and redrafting their writing and finally publishing their work for a real purpose (from podcasts, real letters to post, TV shows, books to send to other schools and our own novels to read to parents at a coffee morning - we write for a vast array of audiences and purposes. Children at Manor Wood are real authors and writers and understand the power of Literacy as a powerful tool to communicate with the world.