Intent

Our goal for writing with all of our children, is to help them become confident, independent, creative thinkers who love to get their ideas down on paper! We want them to understand that writing has a purpose and is a life-long skill they need to succeed. 

We believe to effectively communicate their creativity through writing, our young pupils need to develop foundational transcription skills (spelling and handwriting) as early as possible. Therefore, writing is an integral part of our curriculum.

All of our children are provided with many exciting opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum. Our aim is to equip children with the skills needed to be able to orally rehearse, plan, compose, revise, and evaluate their writing. Furthermore, we strive to be closing the vocabulary gap so our children leave us with good speaking and listening skills.

Implementation

Our writing curriculum focuses on the teaching of composition, handwriting, spelling, punctuation and grammar. The teaching and modelling of vocabulary, listening, speaking, understanding and communicating is at the core of all the children do. Without these skills, they will be unable to master the rest. 

Our curriculum is organised in a progressive way, ensuring the objectives of the EYFS 2021 Handbook and National Curriculum 2014 are closely followed.  Writing is evident across our curriculum and a wide range of genres are taught throughout the school. 

To develop storytelling, vocabulary, and creativity we use some Talk 4 Writing techniques in our teaching of writing. Additionally, in the Early Years we use Helicopter Story techniques to develop our children as storytellers and increase their confidence in oracy skills. Each writing unit is based on a high quality text that will inspire the children. Furthermore, every unit starts with an exciting hook moment so our children are enthusiastic about their writing, and understand the purpose and audience of each piece they write. 

Our teachers model high quality writing and demonstrate the writing process on daily basis with shared and modelled writing. This includes modelling making errors and how we can correct these to make ourselves better writers. Mistakes are cherished at Riddings Infants and Nursery School.

The explicit transcriptional skills needed to write fluently are woven through our daily English lessons to ensure they are learnt in context and directly applied to meaningful writing opportunities. These skills are also taught through our phonics lessons as we follow the Read Write Inc. scheme. Once our children complete the Read Write Inc. scheme they continue to have daily reading and SPAG lessons to develop their fundamental writing skills. 

At Riddings Infants learning through play is central to our visions and values. Writing in context and through play is therefore integral to our writing teaching. Children are encouraged to mark make and write for purpose from the moment they enter our school. Adults model these mark making and writing skills as they engage with the children in continuous and enhanced provision, and resources for writing are available in all areas of the environment. 

As children move through the school, the expectations for independence in writing increase in line with the children's age and stage. Also, the style of feedback and marking has been carefully considered and progresses through and across the year groups in order to ensure our children leave us able to independently edit their own writing. 

For more information on the way we teach writing and the high expectations we have  for our pupils, please see the documents below.

Handwriting is taught on a daily basis across all year groups. We have bespoke exercises books for all areas of the curriculum that contain handwriting lines to ensure our children are scaffolded to produce their best handwriting across the curriculum. For more details on our handwriting expectations please see the links below. 

At Riddings Infants and Nursery School we believe all our pupils deserve the highest quality education and we want to give everyone the best chance at learning to become confident writers. We make our writing curriculum accessible for all children and the following document shows some of the adaptions we would make if needed. The list is not exhaustive. 

Impact

Attainment in Writing is measured through statutory assessment such as at the end of EYFS and the guidance for assessing at the end of KS1. Additionally we track our own writing attainment termly through the use of summative assessment grids, internal and cluster moderation, and spelling assessments.

Formative assessment is a crucial part of daily practise and children are given verbal or written feedback on every piece of writing they produce. In Key Stage 1 we use child-friendly assessment sheets to support children to understand their own next steps and take ownership of their progress. 

Children leave us with an understanding of the importance of fundamental writing skills. They know how their phonics learning supports them in writing, how to look for and correct errors they make, and how to use new vocabulary to impact their readers. Perhaps most importantly, our children talk positively about writing and love to communicate their creative ideas through mark making and early writing skills.

Writing at Home

If you would like to help your child with their writing at home, uses the links and downloads below. Regular handwriting and spelling practice are vital for your child - they need fluency in these skills so they become automated, allowing them to concentrate more on the content and style of their writing. 

Although this list is not exclusive, these are some of the key words we expect your child to be able to spell by the end of KS1.