Year 4 Meet the Teacher Summer 2016 Writing at HPS Year 4 Meet the Teacher Summer 2016

At HPS, children write every day in their English lessons At HPS, children write every day in their English lessons. We also try to give them lots of opportunities to write in other subjects. Each week, the children complete a ‘Big Write’. This is an extended piece of writing which is linked to our theme for the half term. During our Viking theme, the children wrote fact files about Viking artefacts, play scripts based on Viking myths, a description of their own Viking character and an information leaflet about Vikings.

We always begin a new writing topic with a ‘Teach to Read’ session. This allows the children to see an example of the text they will be writing at the end of the week. In ‘Teach to Read’ we explore the features of that particular text type (for example, the tense it is written in, the use of language such as imperative verbs, adverbs etc). The children read and answer questions about the text.

Over the next few English lessons, we teach the children the writing skills they will need when they try to write their own version of the text at the end of the week. Each lesson will focus on one or two features. The teacher will show the children how to include these features in their writing, and they will have the opportunity to practise. The teacher will then feedback to them how they can improve each skill.

All the skills lessons build up to the Big Write. In this session, the teacher may share another example of the kind of text they want the children to produce, or will ‘model’ writing one so the children can see the process they need to go through.

Steps to Success

After a Big Write, the children review their work After a Big Write, the children review their work. They read what they have written and use the success criteria to assess how successful they think they have been in the task that was set. The teacher will mark the writing and give them feedback including what they have done well and how they could improve their writing. Big Writes are also used to assess children’s progress in writing.

What are we looking for in children’s writing in Year 4? Accurate punctuation: full stops, capital letters, speech marks, commas, exclamation marks, apostrophes. Correct use of suffixes and prefixes Accurate spelling - homophones Consistent tense throughout a text. Variety of sentence structures including complex sentences e.g. The noisy pirates, who had spied an enemy, raced across the violent sea. Fronted adverbials Paragraphs

Handwriting Cursive script