Curriculum Vision

At Brackley C of E Junior School we have designed our curriculum with pupils learning and development at the heart. We are committed to providing a curriculum that is broad, balanced and offers opportunities to grow. It is the school’s curriculum vision that teachers strive for academic excellence and encourage every child to reach the highest levels of achievement and personal development. We recognise that every child is unique - therefore we are dedicated to providing a curriculum that is inclusive and meets the needs of every pupil by supporting them in becoming the best they can be, regardless of their background, special needs, ethnicity or disability. We strive to create a friendly, caring atmosphere which is designed to help every child flourish and realise their full potential. The school staff value the different ways in which pupils learn and plan lessons to account for these differences. Through our curriculum we aim for all pupils to be prepared to live life in all its fullness. We want them to be aspirational for their future and recognise that through valuing and participating fully in their education, everyone has a place and can contribute to the wider community.

Writing Intent

At Brackley C of E Junior School, it is our intention to deliver a rich and exciting writing curriculum in which we teach the skills of grammar, punctuation, spelling and transcription. We intend our pupils to leave in year 6 as competent and creative writers who are armed with the skills and creativity for writing for varied purposes and audiences. We believe that writing should be taught as having a purpose, linking with other areas of their learning whilst embedding the skill of writing accurately in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation.  Our curriculum is planned to be progressive and intends to promote high levels of spelling and written language. We have the intention to provide ample opportunities for the children to acquire a wide vocabulary (through our reading culture, words of the week, modelled speaking, use of thesauruses and dictionaries), a solid understanding of grammar and learn and apply spelling patterns, using the No Nonsense spelling programme.

It is our ambition to fully immerse our pupils in writing, by providing meaningful links to other areas of the curriculum offer, opportunities to write for pleasure and displaying and celebrating written work.

Writing Implementation

In order that we create a positive writing culture at Brackley C of E Junior School, we have adopted a progressive planning structure that allows us to write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of purposes and audiences.

National Oak Academy & Literacy Shed

Our writing curriculum promotes a high level of spoken and written language. Our writing culture at BJS enables children to take risks in writing whilst being supported on their journey with the building blocks of spelling, punctuation and grammar. We use and adapt both the National Oak Academy and Literacy Shed units for each year group which cover a broad range of engaging writing genres. We use a variety of writing stimuli from film clips to whole books. We adopt a variety of strategies to encourage, enthuse and support our writers – pre-writing tasks (such as a stimulus, drama), illustrating the text structure, sentence combination exercises, summarising, drafting, editing, revising and sharing. The units are progressive and incorporate spelling, punctuation and grammar as an integral part of the daily lessons. The curriculum is sequential, and pupils work towards clearly defined end points. Teachers monitor and assess work, correcting misunderstandings but also equipping the pupils with the skills to self-edit and improve their writing independently. We do this through editing stations, response to whole class feedback, self and peer marking.

Assessing Writing

Pupil progress in writing is tracked via end of unit writing against year group objectives, self- assessment and peer assessments. The writing is moderated regularly both in-house and between local schools. Children know where they need to improve in writing through whole class feedback, live marking and they are provided opportunities to edit and improve their writing in response to these. We believe that a gradual release of independence will produce quality pieces of independent writing (starting with modelled writing by the teacher to shared writing, guided writing to independent writing).

Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS)

Our belief at BJS is that grammar is best taught in context. We teach topic specific vocabulary and children are encouraged to practise these words regularly within topics. We follow the No Nonsense spelling programme which allows us to deliver discrete spelling sessions, teaching spelling rules which the children practise, apply and review. The children have a spelling journal for recording the rules and practise them in their spelling journals (through a range of engaging activities e.g. colour coding, pyramids shaving foam practice!). Spelling, punctuation and grammar is taught as an integral part of our daily English lessons with opportunities to further practise spelling rules every morning during handwriting sessions. Topic words for our broader curriculum lessons are also recorded in their journals to ensure these words are spelled correctly in these lessons. They are encouraged to find other words that follow the rule and those that don’t. The children’s spelling proficiency is assessed twice in an academic year by administering spelling test. Children with a significantly low score will have a daily intervention. Each term children take home a list of 25 or 30 of the year group exception words and subject specific vocabulary to practise at home. Children will be tested at the end of each term.

Broader Curriculum Writing Opportunities

The children are expected to write for purpose. They are expected to produce written work in broader curriculum lessons of equal quality as English lessons. This refers to sentence structure, punctuation, vocabulary and handwriting. The children are provided with opportunities through their broader curriculum lessons to produce written tasks related to their current topic. The genre of these tasks must be something that has been previously covered within their English lessons to ensure the expected quality e.g. writing a newspaper report in history or a set of instructions in Science for example whereby the features of the genre have already been covered previously.

Handwriting

Letter formation is paramount. The children are explicitly taught how to form and size letters, including capitals using handwriting lined exercise books. Once the letter formation is accurate, then the children should begin to join their handwriting as per the RWI scheme. The children are taught which letters join and which do not and learn how to write in a fluent, legible style. Daily handwriting sessions enable the children to practise their spelling rules alongside their letter formation and joins.