Do you have enough independent writing to assess your year 6 pupils against the writing Teacher Assessment Framework for the end of Key Stage 2?
Plazoom has created a selection of writing activities, linked to the foundation subjects where possible, to provide opportunities for independent writing. These could be used to assess pupils against the TAF statements for writing, providing vital evidence of the standard that pupils are working which could be used for internal or external moderation.
‘Pupils’ writing, on which teachers base their judgements, must be produced independently by the pupil.’ (Key stage 2 teacher assessment guidance, October 2019). This writing activity provides success criteria to help pupils understand what they have learnt and a stimulus for writing but teachers should ‘avoid modelling or over scaffolding the expected outcome.’ (Key Stage 2 teacher assessment guidance, October 2019)
In this writing task, pupils will write a narrative about a journey. This could be used within a geography topic based around a country, climate zone, biome or other physical geographical features that you are currently, or have recently studied.
The activity can be used within a geography lesson, providing an opportunity for cross-curricular writing where pupils can describe and show their understanding of geographical features, using their geographical vocabulary, while also allowing pupils to demonstrate their writing skills independently. Alternatively, it could be used to inspire pupils to write an engaging narrative to provide a further example of independent writing evidence.
This resource pack includes:
- Personal writing skills checklist - for pupils to write their own writing checklists to encourage independent editing.
- Narrative writing skills checklist - a list of features, without modelled examples, for pupils to use as a checklist for editing writing.
- How to describe settings, character and atmosphere poster - a poster for display with the key features when describing characters, setting and atmosphere.
- Passive verbs poster - a poster for display explaining passive verbs to pupils.
- ‘Journey’ story start - an engaging start for their narratives to inspire fantastic writing.
- Setting image cards - a collection of images to inspire creative writing about journeys.
- Narrative planning sheet - to support pupils when planning and organising their ideas.
- Themed writing paper - a PDF writing sheet for pupils to use when writing their final draft which includes the story start for ‘Journey’
- Teacher assessment sheets - for teachers to use to assess pupils against the year 6 writing TAF statements which could be placed in pupils’ books as a record of evidence seen.
TAF Statements the writing could provide evidence for
WTS
To describe settings and characters.
EXS
To describe settings, characters and atmosphere in narratives.
To integrate dialogue in narratives to convey character and advance action.
To select …grammatical structures that reflect what the writing requires, doing this mostly appropriately (e.g. using passive verbs to affect how information is presented.
GDS
To distinguish between the language of speech and writing and choosing the appropriate register