Our curriculum for Writing follows the guidance as set out in the Early Years Foundation Stage and National Curriculum documents.

Early Years:

In Star Class children begin to write through a range of mark-making opportunities as both as taught handwriting skills and in the environment.  We encourage a correct pencil grip and have opportunities for children to use pens, pencils, paintbrushes and other tools. It is important that all children have developed the muscles they need to form letters correctly and this may be through climbing, bouncing a ball and using an easel or whiteboard in an upright position. Initially all children learn to recognise and write their name.  As we learn the sounds required to read, children learn to write these too, this enables them to begin to spell simple words. We use writing in our literacy lessons, through Read, Write Inc and in role-play and free learning activities.  As the writing journey progresses children write simple captions and progress to communicating through sentences with spaces between words, a capital letter and full stop. Star Class love writing books, using clipboards and lists and recording their ideas across the curriculum. 

Key Stages 1 and 2

To ensure depth and breadth of coverage, children write for different purposes: to entertain, to inform, to discuss and to persuade. Within these four 'purposes' can be found a whole range of different types of fiction and non-fiction writing. Units of studyin each of these different types of writing are carefully structured and sequenced to ensure skills and knowledge are developed over the course of each academic year; this in turn allows skills to be built on across each Key Stage, guaranteeing progression.

National curriculum objectives in speaking and listening, composition, transcription, spelling, grammar and punctuation have been allocated to each unit of study, to ensure frequent revisiting of key ideas and a gradual build up in more challenging and complex areas. Every unit of study features an initial stimulus, whether this be a text, an extract of a film, an advertisement or even a famous person or speech. Texts are specially chosen to ensure children are exposed to a wide range of authors, themes, contexts and representation. Shared reading forms a part of nearly every lesson.

Each unit of study has been carefully designed to build on the initial stimulus by identifying language or presentational features of a text type, and exploring how these contribute to the overall effect of a written composition. Generating and sharing ideas helps the children to begin to shape their own compositions based on what they have read, and guided tasks in grammar and punctuation are used to refine these. The children are taught how to gather ideas, and use various planning methods to start to structure these. Once an initial draft for a task has been produced, the children are also shown how to reflect on their work, making simple corrections and amendments from Year 1. As they get older, more confident, and more skilled, they are able to edit and amend their writing more freely, independently redrafting entire sections in some cases, to achieve a polished final composition.

In certain tasks, writing may also be published by hand or on-screen.

The acquisition of key vocabulary is recognised as central to all teaching in English, whether this is related to the grammatical structure of a text or is linked more to the composition and effect of a piece of writing. Children are encouraged to discuss and respond using the correct terminology, and are supported to do so as they get to grips with new words and phrases.

What does writing look like in each year group?

The following document is an ongoing record of children's writing at our school. Its aim is twofold:

- to provide parents/carers with an idea of what writing at the expected level for each year group looks like

- to build a reference bank for writing moderation in school

Each piece of writing you see here is an identical task presented to all children from Early Years to Year 6. Over the course of a year, the writing tasks will demonstrate a greater command of the particular year group's writing objectives.