Writing
The teaching of early writing is closely linked to the teaching of phonics. We start our formal phonics programme in Reception, although children are taught some numbers and letters in Nursery. For more information about this, please see our Reading section.
In Nursery, children take part in ‘Story Dough’ sessions. Through these sessions, they are encouraged to talk about and explore different stories through playdough. There is a strong focus on language development and engagement with a wide range of texts.
Throughout Reception and in the first term of Year 1, we use ‘Drawing Club’. Drawing club is a time for children to choose to come and be creative with their imagination. After listening to a traditional tale, a well-known story or an animation from the past, the children are taken on an adventure with words, actions and descriptive drawings.
The children use their imagination to create a theme, object or character from the story and they use their stories as a conversation starter to talk about what their picture means to them.
They then choose a ‘code’ of numbers, letters or even words to bring magic into the drawing with their creative ideas!
From the Spring Term of Year 1, we use ‘The Write Stuff’ by Jane Considine. The Write Stuff to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing. This method allows pupils to improve their oracy and widen their vocabulary in every lesson, whilst deepening their understanding of writerly choices. Pupils love their writing lessons and can’t wait to show what they’ve learnt in their independent extended pieces at the end of each unit.
All our writing is taught through the ‘writing rainbow’ which provides a lens for the writer to focus through in order to ensure all writing is effective and engaging for the reader, whilst meeting the intended purpose.
"The Write Stuff" uses three essential components to support children in becoming great writers.
The three zones of writing:
- IDEAS - The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.
- TOOLS - The GRAMMARISTICS. The grammar rules of our language system and an accessible way to target weaknesses in pupils grammatical and linguistic structures.
- TECHNIQUES - The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.
"The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. Throughout writing lessons, children continually re-visit and apply their known writing skills. Each individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
Following the completion of a ‘Sentence Stacking’ sequence, pupils then plan and write independent texts where they are able to show the writing skills they have been developing.
At the end of each Writing Unit, we give children the opportunity to practise a style of writing that they have already learned about in a new context.
The following document lays out our 'Writing Spine', the writing topics covered from Year 1 to Year 6.
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