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St Patrick's Primary School
Together Everyone Achieves More. Journey to Learning
Composition/Writing
Writing should be fun. Children should be inspired to write about things they see around them; whatever excites them, scares them or just make them laugh, then transform their ideas in stories by adding a big dollop of their imagination.
Encouraging children to write a story of their very own can give them an enormous confidence boost, as well as helping them consolidate their literacy learning by putting their phonics, grammar and reading skills into practice.
Encouraging children to write a story of their very own can give them an enormous confidence boost, as well as helping them consolidate their literacy learning by putting their phonics, grammar and reading skills into practice.
What is Extended Writing?
At St Patricks, Extended writing is when children are given a set amount of time to produce a piece of writing without any help.
Usually, the extended writing session will mark the end of a unit of literacy teaching. Pupils should have extended writing opportunities to consolidate their learning across the curriculum.
For example: teachers may spend three or four weeks working with the children on play scripts. They may start by reading and performing play scripts, then will practise writing speech out using play-script conventions, then start to draft their own scenes and perform them.
At the end of the unit, they will be expected to produce their own play-script in the extended writing session, showing what they have learnt over the past few weeks.
In the classroom
Extended writing at St Patricks consists of a session prior to writing when teachers encourage children to use VCOP (Vocabulary, Connectives, Openings and Punctuation):
| Vocabulary | Encouraging children to use good descriptive vocabulary (adjectives in Key Stage 1, moving onto powerful verbs and adverbs in Key Stage 2). |
| Connectives | Children will practise putting connectives into their writing. In Key Stage 1 these will include: but, so, and, then, because. In Key Stage 2 these will include: therefore, meanwhile, furthermore, consequently, whenever. |
| Openings | Children will be encouraged to open their sentences in a variety of different ways, for example: using a connective such as 'Eventually', an adverb such as 'Warily' or a -ing word, such as 'Whistling'. |
| Punctuation | In Key Stage 1, children will need to remember full stops and capitals.In lower Key Stage 2, children will need to start using exclamation marks and question marks. In upper Key Stage 2, children need to use correct speech punctuation plus apostrophes and commas. |
Children are then given about 10 minutes to plan their piece of writing. In Key Stage 1 they will be given about 30 minutes to complete their writing task and in Key Stage 2 they are given about 45 minutes.
Writing should be done independently. Playing music quietly in the background, the idea is that children are given the space and time to really concentrate on their writing and apply all the skills they have been learning.