Writing

‘One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.’ Malala Yousafzai

Writing is such a powerful tool to communicate thoughts, passion, creativity and opinions. This vital skill drives us in our teaching of writing throughout school. We want all of our children to be thoughtful, imaginative and reflective writers who are able to write confidently for a range of purposes and audiences.

A writer will:

• Enjoy writing and want to write
• Write in a range of genres
• Know the audience they are writing for
• Use strategies to edit and improve their writing
• Confidently use grammar they have been taught and apply to their writing
• Use ideas from the texts they have read to inspire their writing
• Can write using legible and joined handwriting

From the beginning of EYFS, children are encouraged to mark make in a variety of ways and experiment with how to make the shape of letters. By the end of EYFS, our aim is for all children to be able to form all of their letters correctly and start to write sentences using their phonics knowledge.

We also know that the link between fluent, confident readers and able writers is a strong and proven connection. Therefore, we use high quality texts, using the rich vocabulary and inspiring stories to move the children’s writing forwards. Children have opportunities for oral rehearsal, to edit and improve their writing and teachers to model writing with the children. By the end of KS1, all children should be able to punctuate their writing consistently with full stops and capital letters, write for different purposes and join some of their sentences using co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

In KS2, high quality texts, which both inspire and engage the children are used to help with their writing. They write for real audiences and purposes. For example, in Year 6, they write to companies who are not using sustainable palm oil in their products. They post these letters to the companies. By the end of Year 6, all children should be able to punctuate their work accurately using a range of punctuation, use a wide range of vocabulary to write for different purposes and think about ways in which to engage their reader in the writing.

Handwriting

As a school, we follow the Letter Join scheme. It introduces cursive handwriting in step-by-step stages in line with the curriculum. Children’s personal handwriting style is developed to ensure they meet the ‘expected standard’ in the end of key stage writing teacher assessments. Letters are introduced systematically and each unit includes pattern practice and motor skills work with three levels of differentiation.

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Children complete regular handwriting practice according their year group and needs. Clear handwriting is an expectation for all writing across the curriculum and actively encouraged.

Spelling

In EYFS and KS1 spelling is taught within the phonics sessions, using the Little Wandle phonics scheme.

In EYFS, they will start to learn to spell some tricky words as well as using the grapheme phoneme correspondence to write words. They will learn that each phoneme is represented by a grapheme when spelling.

In Year 1 they will learn to spell the year 1 common exception words and they will learn alternative graphemes for spelling.  

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In KS2 we use Spelling Shed. Lessons are taught during the week and children then use the website at home to practise the spellings through a variety of games.