Writing
We aim for our children to become confident, capable and inspired writers. Our writing curriculum enables our children to learn the correct transcriptional and compositional knowledge required to make them successful writers.
We believe that good quality handwriting is hugely important. It shows care, pride and concentration. It can also raise a child's self esteem and therefore, their attitude towards learning in general. We know that good handwriting needs self-discipline, skill and quality teacher input. We use the Achieving Excellence in Handwriting approach to teach handwriting, which is based on a semi-cursive style. We know that there are many parts to teaching handwriting, which include good quality writing tools, correct body posture and uniformity in the teaching of handwriting throughout school.
We believe that children need to be secure with the basics if they are to become successful writers. To ensure our children are confident with sentence construction, we use Grammarsaurus' Place Value of Grammar and Punctuation as part of our writing curriculum from Year 1 to Year 6 (as soon as children are secure with Phase 3 phonics). This is then embedded during daily writing sessions throughout the year.
We ensure that our children are taught spelling rules and common exception words from the National Curriculum. Children have weekly spelling and vocabulary lessons, and they are given opportunities to practise their spellings over the school week. Throughout school, we use Emile so students can develop their spelling skills in a fun way.
Our writing journey begins with dictated sentences in EYFS and KS1, and moves towards independent sentences when phonics knowledge is secure. In KS2, we move towards writing in different genres. It is important to us that our children are writing around subjects that they understand. Mostly, our writing is based around books we have read in class, although it may be related to experiences the children have. Other writing requires the children to use their imagination. In our writing lessons, children learn the features of a text, grammar and how to apply grammar into writing, how to plan, how to build sentences and paragraphs and how to edit and improve their writing.