Writing
At Fircroft it is our aim that every child gains the skills and knowledge they need to write with fluency, accuracy and enjoyment. We want our pupils to be able to write for a range of purposes and audiences, and to realise that a well-crafted piece of writing is a powerful tool for sharing their thoughts and ideas with the world.
How do we teach writing at Fircroft?
At the core of our Writing curriculum, is the regular opportunity for pupils to engage with high quality children’s literature to serve as both inspiration and a model for their own writing. We carefully select texts to link with our termly themes and map out a learning sequence which both immerses children in the author’s world and provides rich and varied opportunities for writing.
The learning sequence for writing, takes children through the writing process, beginning with understanding the audience and purpose of their writing. The writing process can include: talking and discussing, generating and gathering ideas, planning, drafting, editing and publishing.
A key component of any writing lesson sequence is the opportunity to engage in speaking and listening activities through drama and oracy. This allows children to practise and internalise the vocabulary and grammatical structures they need for writing in a range of genres. Our genre progression grids (below) highlight the skills needed for each writing style and demonstrate how this changes for each year group and key stage.
Fircroft progression in fiction writing
Fircroft progression in non fiction writing
Grammar, vocabulary and punctuation are taught in context so that children have a meaningful opportunity to apply their learning. Children are always shown what ‘a good one looks like’ through the careful modelling of writing and, at an age-appropriate level, co-construct the success criteria which will often include specific grammar, vocabulary and punctuation required for the genre.
Children are always encouraged to be reflective, ambitious writers and are taught how to edit their writing effectively. To support children in improving their writing, as well as the lesson’s success criteria, 'Always Looking For' (ALF) grids are provided for them. These remind children of the writing expectations for their year group and support them in knowing what successful writing looks like. We also share ‘I Can' statements with children, which are the assessment statements for their year group, written in child-friendly language, to support pupils’ understanding of the expectations for their year group.
To see themselves as writers, we give children regular opportunities to publish their work and share with an audience. Each classroom has an ‘Author’s Chair’ which is a popular way of celebrating writing achievements every week, with peers. We also encourage children to enter writing competitions and have had many successful entrants in recent years to the Wimbledon BookFest Young Writers competition.
We aim to encourage writing for pleasure at Fircroft. We wish for children to see themselves as writers and want to inspire them to love writing and to want to do so independently, not just in their writing lessons. To achieve this, we provide each child with their own personal writing project book. For more information on how these are used at school and at home, please read the 'Encouraging Writing' document below.
Encouraging writing at home and at school
Spelling
Spelling is a key part of our writing curriculum. Early on, children are taught to apply their phonics knowledge whenever they engage in writing activities. In addition, they are explicitly taught how to recognise and spell 'tricky' words as part of our phonics programme. We then use the No-Nonsense spelling programme from Years 2-6, which uses a range of strategies to help children learn common spelling patterns, as well as the words from the National Curriculum statutory word lists.
From Year 2 onwards children are given short weekly lists of spellings to practise both in school and at home. Pupils also have regular opportunities to reflect upon their own spelling strengths and weaknesses and to compile short, personal lists of words which they need to learn. We then encourage pupils to pay particular attention to these words, when independently editing their writing.
Handwriting
We place great importance upon the development of clear, neat and joined handwriting which starts in the Early Years with the introduction of careful letter formation, moves on through Key Stage 1 to develop a cursive style and then into Key Stage 2 where pupils continue to have regular handwriting sessions in order to develop a neat, fluent and joined style.
Click here to see our handwriting style.
