Clayton Village Primary School Staff Login

Writing

The Writing Curriculum

At Clayton Village Primary School, we intend to create confident writers who develop stamina for writing throughout school. We aim for all of our children to be independent writers, building on a range of skills as they work through each journey of writing and for them to be able to write for a range of purposes and audiences. Throughout this journey, we ensure the children of Clayton Village are immersed in a range of genres and have a clear understanding of purpose. Our learners will have a secure understanding of the purpose of a text type, the intended impact of writing skills/tools and the ability to carefully select vocabulary with careful attention to the desired effect on the readers’ thoughts and feelings. Our learners are challenged and encouraged to take risks and view mistakes as part of the learning process. Our learners should always set high expectations for themselves where they take pride in all aspects of learning and in everything they produce.

Writing at Key Stage 2

Each unit of writing will consist of learning done over roughly a 3-week learning journey and will be done through 1-hour lessons Monday to Friday. Staff can choose to focus their writing around a book or video. Teachers will identify the audience, purpose and outcome in advance of writing and create a unit overview. Children are taught grammatical and stylistic features from their year group expectations in the National Curriculum; there may be times where revisiting and reteaching previous year group’s learning is required. Each unit of work will begin with an immersion session to hook and engage the children into their writing. There will also be opportunities to practise drama and also apply their learning into ‘cold’ writing.

In Key Stage 2, teacher’s use Jane Considine’s fantastics and grammaristics to focus their writing. By using these, it provides opportunities to discuss vocabulary and the purpose of word choices they are making and ensuring that they have the desired impact.

At the end of the writing unit, children draft, edit and improve and then publish their writing. Children are directed in their editing so that they understand that this can be done to correct or improve their writing. This is completed in polishing pen. Once they have edited their work, this is then presented in their Published Writing books as a final draft. This can be done through a variety of techniques and presentation devices. This final piece is then detail marked according to the year group expectations.

Handwriting

At Clayton Village we teach the children to write in a cursive style from Reception. When your child first comes to school, they will learn to form every letter with an entry and exit stroke. A legible, cursive handwriting style is important as in Year 6 it is part of the writing expectation to achieve the age related standard.

This is a solid foundation for teaching joined handwriting later on. Children are taught that every letter starts on the line. Next we begin to teach digraphs and trigraphs as joined letters. The first being

You can support your child at home by encouraging them to trace over the handwriting sheets provided on a regular basis. Reluctant writers are often more willing to try if you give them different colour pens to trace over. You can even enlarge the letters and trace over using paint, chalk, using a bottle of water with a sports cap, or even tracing over the letters with a toy car.

Constant repetition is the key, emphasising the correct entry and exit strokes every time. It is essential that your child gets into good habits early on and this includes having the correct pencil grip.

One of the advantages of the cursive style is that you can quickly identify when a child is forming letters incorrectly. For example trying to start a    at the bottom and moving clockwise, rather than starting with the entry stroke and then moving anticlockwise from the top of the letter to the bottom.

Although the cursive style can seem quite laborious to start as it takes slightly longer to write each letter separately, you will really see the benefits when your child starts to join fully towards the end of Year 1 and in Year 2. The cursive approach has been very successful in our school.

Downloads:

Cursive handwriting with arrows to indicate correct formation

Capital letters

Cursive handwriting

Lower case letters