Bidston Avenue is a
large primary school, with over 400 children, on the edge of north Birkenhead.
It takes children from a diverse area including Bidston, one of the poorest
wards in the country, and the slightly more affluent Claughton. The school is a
Creative Partnership school and has strengths in music, drama and dance.
Background and
rationale
The school has
identified children's writing as a focus for improvement over the next few
months. Writing at Key Stage 1 in the school has become successful recently,
but the school would now like to extend this achievement through the school and
into Key Stage 2 - particularly Years 3, 4 and 5. Whilst children tend to be
competent writers of non-narrative text, they are less confident and skilful
with narrative, particularly story writing. The school's staff feel that there
is a need to take a holistic view of language by developing children's
abilities with story listening, reading, telling, enactment, retelling and then
writing. SATs results in writing have been disappointing, but it is felt that
enhancing pupils' confidence, commitment and enjoyment will have an impact also
on performance standards.
Teachers in upper
Key Stage 2 were concerned that many children could not write interesting,
well-structured stories and that this had been an issue for two years, meaning
that it had now become a focus for improvement.
In addition, specific work on story in Year 1 was enabling children to
tell and write stories which were well-structured, sustained and interesting.
The head and SMT were keen to extend this throughout the school using a range
of strategies, including story listening, reading, telling and enactment
through play.
Implications
The school was very
committed to the project and will continue to develop and research their work
on developing story writing. They have learnt that even young children can and
are motivated to write for 45 minutes and this will lead to a more flexible
approach to lesson timings. The staff are reassessing planning in order to
immerse children in language of a particular theme or topic, having already
embraced the concept of cross-curricular planning. The impact of the work will
change the way in which children are taught story-writing. The importance of
play in a variety of forms will be integrated into planning in order to enhance
children's understanding and abilities to speak of and write about particular
topics and subjects.
Evaluation
Of the 11 teachers who returned evaluation
forms, all of them deemed the overall learning experience to be very good or
good. The clarity of objectives and outcomes of the project were also thought
to have been very good or good by 82% of the teachers.
