Managing your Recovery Curriculum for Writing

But what should we actually be doing from a practical point of view to support our pupils in catching up in writing?

The first step is to look at your planned curriculum for writing – whether you use a scheme like Pathways to Write or have developed your own sequenced curriculum – and using this as a starting point to identify and then prioritise the teaching of missed content.

• Identify which elements of the curriculum were covered well during remote teaching and which were less effective.
• Adapt this year’s planning to ensure that the gaps in last year’s planned curriculum are plugged quickly.
• Identify skills that were taught but that pupils have not fully mastered due to the nature and disruption of learning from home through assessment of pupils’ writing. Then take steps to prioritise these in your teaching.
• Focus on a few elements at a time, rather than trying to tackle gaps across the whole writing curriculum at once. Prioritise an area for catch-up each half term: grammatical structures and punctuation; tense; level of detail; cohesive devices; vocabulary.

One way of doing this is to provide pupils with a zone of relevance to help them to create sentences. This can be done with conjunctions, as in our example here, with fronted adverbials or relative clauses. In this example we have used Alba the Hundred Year Old Fish by Lisa Hawthorne and created a simple sentence to sit at the centre. Around the next ring are a range of conjunctions that might be used to extend the sentence and then further clauses that could be added. Using this structure, pupils can create sentences using the conjunctions and decide how relevant they are to the context of the story. Some sentences will be nonsense and others might be relevant in a different context.