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!

In Year 2 we move away from Drawing Club and start to build longer pieces of writing using a text-based planning approach. This approach allows children to be inspired by books, looking at how an author constructs sentences and the effect that they have on the reader. We create a final piece of writing every two weeks, building this through sentence level construction work, explicit grammar lessons, investigating model texts, planning, drafting, editing and publishing our own writing, all inspired by the books that we have read.

In Years 3-6 the approach deepens to a three-week structure to allow for the inclusion of shared planning and writing of a text on top of the content from the Year 2 model. Each year group will have grammar and sentence level targets which match the abilities of the children and cover the year group specific content for writing.

This approach allows the teacher to adapt the content of the lessons to meet the needs of the class and has a strong focus on the purpose, audience and effect in writing to make writing a fun and meaningful experience for all children.

These documents explain the expectations for each year group:

You may also find these documents helpful:

National Curriculum for English

Early Years and Foundation Stage Framework

The Subject Leader for Writing is Ms Swarbrick. If you have any questions about how writing is taught, you should speak to your child's class teacher or contact Ms Swarbrick through the office.