What is Big Writing?

Big writing is an initiative to raise standards in writing. It aims to promote enjoyment and confidence in young writers and to equip them with the tools to improve their writing.

What happens in Big Writing?

There are several components to Big Writing:

Basic Skills

Every day, there is a ten minute session on basic skills to help children revisit things that they may have forgotten or may need more help with.

Monday : Spellings

Tuesday: Phonics (sounds)

Wednesday: Grammar and punctuation

Thursday: Handwriting

Friday: Times Tables

Thursday

The task for Friday's Big Writing session is introduced to the children. The class discusses the structure of the text type that they will be writing, the things that they need to remember and ideas for the topic they will be writing about. Children are also encouraged to discuss the Big Writing task at home to help them generate more ideas (it is important that they don't feel pressured to write at this stage - the emphasis is on TALKING!).

Friday

Big Writing Day - starting at 10am. Children have a 30 minute quick, exciting session where they practice skills, particularly looking at vocabulary, connectives, sentence openers and punctuation.They then have 15 minutes to plan their writing before going out to play.

When they return, they are greeted at the door by the teacher. The classroom is a relaxing, calm place with calming music (Mozart) playing and a candle alight to help the children to focus their thoughts. They work independently for 45 minutes. During this time, they are reminded to check their work every 10 minutes - looking at punctuation, vocabulary choices (we call them 'Wow words'!) and sentence openers (children are reminded that 'Power Openers' include words ending in 'ing', 'ly' or connectives) - they are rewarded for this with freshly made popcorn. The writing is done using lined paper and a special writing pen, which is collected back in after each Big Writing session to keep it safe.

The work is marked over the weekend, returned to the children after the weekend and kept in a very special 'writing portfolio' (which the children already take a great pride in).