Milestone Three

In Milestone 3, our students reach new heights in their writing journey. At this stage, they are honing their craft by planning their writing with great precision. They identify the audience and purpose of their composition, selecting the appropriate form. Drawing inspiration from similar writings, they use existing pieces as models for their own, gaining insights into the art of crafting compelling narratives or factual content.

Students develop their ideas into well-structured plans before they begin to write, considering how authors have developed characters and settings in the literature they've read, listened to, or watched. They note and develop initial ideas, often drawing on their extensive reading and research. Their narratives are immersive as they describe settings, characters, and atmosphere with vivid detail. They maintain a balance between action and dialogue, as well as fact and commentary in their content. Their viewpoint is established and generally maintained throughout their writing, creating engaging narratives or informative pieces.

Their writing features expanded noun phrases that convey complex information concisely. Detailed events and ideas are supported through elaboration and the use of appropriate vocabulary, adapting to the writing purpose and genre. Grammar and vocabulary choices are meticulously selected to change and enhance meaning, and students are well-versed in evaluating and editing their work, proposing changes to vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation to enhance effects and clarify meaning.

In terms of organisation, students use further presentational devices to structure their text, guiding the reader effectively. They organise related events or ideas into paragraphs or sections, ensuring content flows seamlessly. Sentences are mostly grammatically sound, and they exhibit an appropriate choice of tense and some variation of modal verbs to express possibility. As students draft and write, they become proficient at summarising longer passages, producing internally coherent paragraphs with a logical sequence. They utilise devices such as adverbials of time, place, and sequence to link ideas across paragraphs. Their writing repertoire is enriched with a range of sentence structures, including simple, compound, and complex, allowing them to expand ideas, provide emphasis, detail, and description.

They master the consistent and correct use of tense throughout their writing, including the appropriate use of modal verbs and subjunctive forms. Students confidently use various punctuation marks, such as colons to introduce lists and inverted commas for dialogue, ensuring their writing is grammatically impeccable. They learn to proofread for spelling and punctuation errors, and they explore advanced grammatical features like verb prefixes and relative clauses. Drawing on a repertoire of sentence structures, they manipulate the order of elements within a sentence, including fronted adverbials and subordinate clauses. Students become proficient in recognising vocabulary and structures appropriate for formal speech and writing, even incorporating semi-colons, colons, and dashes to mark boundaries and enhance clarity. They use hyphens to avoid ambiguity and experiment with question tags and ellipses to add nuance to their writing.

As they continually develop their understanding of advanced writing concepts, students demonstrate their ability to evaluate writing for overall impact and suitability for the audience and purpose. They listen to and act on feedback, linked to previous and recent teaching, leading to a refined and polished piece of writing. Through Milestone 3, our students evolve into accomplished and confident writers, equipped to tackle any writing challenge that comes their way.