Writing Journey

Our ultimate aim is for children to enjoy writing – it should never be a chore. We encourage writing in all subjects eg writing information and findings in Science, information in History and Geography, explaining reasoning in Maths, writing instruction in DT and thoughts in Art, writing musical composition in Music etc.

While ‘correct’ writing is always encouraged, it is important to gain more experience and build confidence/resilience by experimenting with writing in all subject areas. Writing is encouraged from the earliest days in Year R, using any medium. Working on gross motor skills is also seen as an important precursor to writing – this continues throughout the school, with the focus moving to fine motor skills when the children are ready.

• Writing links very closely with our Reading Journey.
• We use core texts to link across the curriculum eg Katie Morag and The Snail and the Whale link to Geography and Science (habitats), Jack and the Baked Beanstalk links to Science (growth). See Text Maps for full details of links.
• We aim to teach writing skills explicitly eg ‘I am writing a sentence so I need to start with a capital letter’. Grammar progression is detailed in our Grammar Progression grid.
• All writing is preceded by talk. Children need to vocalise their thoughts, through role play, drama and hot seating, progressing to class and peer discussion. This is followed by lots of modelled writing, then shared writing, peer discussion then finally independent writing.
• As children need to write from their own experiences, we offer this as much as possible. In Year R, children write about their experiences in their homes and in school. Year 1 start to go on trips and write about this. In Year 2, the children write regular recounts of activities they did in the holidays or that they experienced on a school visit. They also move on to writing instructions for something they have made.
• We use emergent writing in Year R, then we expect children to correctly use the graphemes they learn in Phonics and to begin to spell some of the Common Exception words for their year group. By year 2, children will be expected to use and apply some of the spelling rules they have learned.
• Alongside writing from experience, children must write from stories they know. These are used as a stimulus for writing across the school. We progress through a variety of increasingly complex texts and progress from writing sentences about texts in Year R, to retelling short stories or parts of stories in Year 1, to creating our own stories in Year 2. We always value quality of writing over quantity of writing. By Year 2, children are taught specific editing skills to enable them to check and improve their own writing.
• We aim to ensure that all different genres are covered, both in reading and writing, in each year group.