The school was inspected in June 1996 and again in June 2000 and recieved many excellent comments regarding the teaching of Literacy throughout the school. As a result of this (and other areas), we were selected to be a Beacon school for Bedfordshire.

The information contained in these pages has been designed in such a way as to share our proven good practice and enable other schools to use some of our ideas and strategies.
 

1. OFSTED Report	2. PANDA Report	3. The Teaching of Writing
4. Planning Year Two Writing Lessons	5. Examples of Children's Work and Teacher Information	6. Supporting Special Needs Children
7. Ensuring Progression - Writing Ladders	8. Ensuring Progression - Writing Targets	9. Conclusion
- - -	10. Return to the Home page	- - -

Scroll down the page to find the information you require or click in the table to go direcly to a specific area. Many images can be clicked on to see a larger verion or to download a Word document.

These comment are taken from our OFSTED report based on the inspection carried out June 2000.
 

The quality of teaching is a strength of the school. Teachers have a detailed knowledge of the needs of individuals in their classes and work hard to provide relevant activities which capture pupils' interest and imagination. Teaching of English and mathematics is consistently good. The structures from the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies have been successfully introduced and lessons move at a brisk and productive pace, resulting in good quality learning. In all lessons teachers involve pupils fully in lively and relevant discussion and debate. As a result pupils' condidence in speaking and listening and their level of understanding is impressively mature (p8).

These comments are taken from the Inspection Judgements section of our 2000 PANDA Report from October 2000.
 

~ standards achieved by pupils were very good, ~ the quality of eduction provided by the school was good, ~ the school's climate for learning was very good, ~ the management and efficiency of the school were good, In this respect, your school was judged to be very good (p7). Compared to schools in similar contexts the school was awarded A* for reading, writing and mathematics tests / tasks (p8).

The teaching of writing has to be as carefully structured and developed as the teaching of reading, Young children have even less awareness of the conventions of writing than they do of reading. Yet recent Literacy initiatives have broadened our horizons in terms of oour expectation of what children should be able to achieve in writing.

In our school we have been encouraged to experiment with a range of genres and we have found that even quite young children can deal with non-fiction, letter writing, analysis and poetry writing given the appropriate stimulus and structure.

The block of work, which follows, was used with a new mixed ability year 2 class. It shows the progress from writing from personal experience through research and finally into imaginative writing. The children were asked to plan their writing, to review it and to work towards personal targets. All of the children were enabled to succeed through differentiated support.

At the planning stage the whole set of lessons, including cross curricular links, was considered and 6 key objectives became clear.

* to assess levels pupils are operating at as they enter Year 2,
* to use assessment to set individual and group targets,
* to use story structure to write own story,
* to use knowledge achieved through various stimuli to write an extended piece,
* to develop understanding of different writing styles for different purposes,
* to work independently and feel a sense of achievement through writing,

Preparation for Writing

Week 1 - Humanities investigation of how the children had changed since they were babies, using photographs and artefacts - pupils produced a simple piece of writing showing these changes.

Week 2 - In guided and group reading sessions research was carried out using the book project series on babies, encyclopaedias and CD Rom. Pupils wrote a non-fiction piece which was used for baseline assessment and target setting. A mother also brought her baby twins in to school for the children so see and to answer questions the children had composed in a literacy session.

Week 3 - In story time for two days previous to the writing session we read and discussed amazing baby stories : 'Avacado Baby' by John Burningham and 'Bye Bye Baby' by Allan Alhberg were favourites. They compared the amazing things these babies did with the reality the children had discovered through their research. Finally, the afternoon before the session we imagined the baby in the pram (in the picture) was an amazing baby and the children planned the story they would write using the structure found in the story books.

How I Have Changed Humanities work week 1

Non Fiction Baby Plan Literacy work week 2

All About Babies Literacy work week 2

Teacher Comments and Writing Targets

An Amazing Baby Story (plan) Literacy work week 3

An Amazing Baby Story   Literacy Work week 3

Annotation Sheet

Performance Descriptions

All the teachers in the school are committed to providing the very best for all the Special Educational Needs children in our classes. This means supporting children with difficulties by involving the children, their parents, other staff and the SENCO working together as a partnership. We also target high achieving children with their own IEP's so that they can continue to make good progress and be pushed and challenged even further.

You can use the table to select two examples of IEP's we are currently using. You can also print off and use our blank Word document copy.
 

Year Two IEP child with difficulties

Year Four IEP child to be challenged further

Blank IEP Word document

As part of the process of developing writing throughout the school we have introduced 'Writing Ladders' to indicate childrens' writing progression. Teachers are free to use them as they wish in their own classes. On some occassions they are used to focus the whole class on expectations and progression, while at other times they may be used to support and encourage individual children or small groups.

They are currently being updated. However, you may download our current versions and change the headings so suit your own class names or year groups.
 

Acorn Class Ladder - Year R (in progress)

Willow Class Ladder - Year 1

Maple Class Ladder - Year 2

Palm Class Ladder - Year 3

Oak Class Ladder - Year 4

Children are supported individually in writing with their own target cards. After both formal and informal assessment at the beginning of the year and after consultation with the child's previous class teacher, the children are given targets. These are put onto card and are cut so they form a bookmark. The children then have the cards in their books and are reminded of the targets each time they use their book.

When a target is achieved, independently, they are given a star. After five stars, or when the child is ready, it can be 'signed off' and celebrated and a new target can be given on the same card. By using our cards in this way the children can see their own progress - they can see where they have come from and where they are going to next.

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We hope you find our materials, activities and suggestions useful and are able to use some of them in your own classrooms.

Please ring the school if you would like any further information about any thing on these pages or anything connected with our Beacon status. We will be happy to help.

Please look again soon as we hope to be able to share more information regarding our other Beacon status areas.

Pages created by :     Mrs Newman (Year 1 Teacher and Literacy Co-ordinator)
                                Mrs Purdue (Year 2 Teacher and AST)
                                Miss Devonshire (Year 4 Teacher and ICT Co-ordinator)