At Brookfield we aim to increase children’s interest and engagement through opportunities for interactive and ‘fun’ writing:

• We use a variety of ways to stimulate the children’s interest and ‘hook’ them into a theme. It could be through a video clip, a piece of music, an offsite visit or even suddenly discovering a dragon’s egg in a huge nest in the corner of the classroom!!!
• Alongside this, high quality class texts are used and writing themes are often based around the current chapter the class are reading.
• ‘Writing Days’ held each term give the children opportunities to really engage with their writing, maybe by dressing up in outfits appropriate to the theme or by bringing in props to include within their writing.
• Children sometimes share their writing with children in other classes, using this as an opportunity to share/enjoy/appreciate good quality writing and to ‘magpie’ good words and phrases for future writing.
• Learning Hero Awards are often used to acknowledge children who have shown great efforts and improvements in writing.

To prepare the children for writing we spend English lessons encouraging them to ‘talk’ through their story journeys and develop their ideas through drama and partner talk which helps them to build their vocabulary. We help them to create, build, develop and improve their ideas so in the end they are just ‘bursting’ to write.

Our children are prepared right up to the point of writing and we even spend time at the beginning of lessons preparing grammatically correct and appropriate sentences, creating banks of high quality vocabulary and developing focused grammar skills so they all have a starting point for their writing. They work towards completing an extended piece of writing throughout the week, alongside self and peer assessment, which helps to improve their final piece.