Writing
Our English curriculum is tailored to empower children to become confident writers and to take pride in their written work. Writing is valued across the curriculum, and we give children opportunities to write for a variety of purposes. Children in our school acquire strategies to enable them to become independent learners who recognise and confidently use: spelling patterns and rules, ambitious vocabulary, grammatical features and rules, and accurate punctuation.
Teachers use a variety of approaches and strategies to teach writing. One we have adopted this year is the principles of The Write Stuff by Jane Considine. These lessons use ‘Sentence Stacking’ to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they then apply to their own writing. Each writing lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into three learning chunks:
- Initiate: a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination, promote rich vocabulary and inspire a sentence.
- Model: the teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable: the children write their sentence, following the model.
Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing.
Letter formation is taught from Reception, alongside phonics. Children are taught to print letters and graphemes in Reception as per the Little Wandle approach, then pre-cursive in Year 1. We aim for all children to use continuous cursive handwriting by the end of Year 2.
Print letter formation
Pre-cursive
Continuous cursive
See below for our progression document in Writing and further information on handwriting.
AuthorFy is a great website to use at home. Every day a new writing challenge is posted by bestselling authors and illustrators.