Crow Lane Primary And Foundation Stage School
English: Learning to write
Writing
Inspired by the class novel, current affairs or purposefully linked to topic learning, pupils learn the skills necessary to communicate their ideas in written form. We place importance on developing clear, legible handwriting, accurate spelling and the correct use of grammatical conventions. Our focus on speaking and listening means we build and develop ideas and use shared writing to provide structure and clear models in a safe and encouraging way.
Early writing, in Reception - Year 2, is developed creatively, tapping into young children's imaginations to engage, enthuse and inspire them as writers - without them realising! Drawing Club and Curious Quests takes a story-based approach that creatively and progressively develops children's vocabulary, sentence construction and basic punctuation through immersing them in the magic of stories and rich language.
In KS2, children learn to structure their story writing through learning Pie Corbett's Story Mountain model, which, over time, gives them a strong understanding of how to build a narrative and then concentrate on stylistic devices that hook their readers in and turn good stories into great ones.
When teaching the children to write non-fiction texts, we use the SUCCESS approach, developed by Alan Peat. This develops their structural understanding, enables confident composition and draws on self-evaluation to support effective reviewing, editing and re-drafting skills.
We also use the Alan Peat sentence types as a tool to encourage children to use a wide variety of sentences appropriate to different styles of writing, e.g. recount, report, narrative, etc. These sentences link directly to the grammar and punctuation objectives of the National Curriculum, helping our children to understand and use different techniques in their own writing, making it more interesting to the reader.
Read, Write, Inc spelling resources are used across school to support the systematic teaching of spelling, including developing understanding of how words are built up from a root, spelling rules and common exceptions, and how to use these to work out the spelling of new words learned and be confident spellers.
