Approach to Writing

We believe that every child is a writer. We are passionate about developing every child’s knowledge, motivation and confidence in their writing. We have chosen HFL Education’s Essential Writing as the basis of our writing curriculum for years 1-6. This is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme which provides our children with opportunities and tools to write for a range of specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, our children feel inspired and ready to write high-quality outcomes within the classroom but also have the knowledge, strategies and confidence to choose to write in their own lives.  

Writing Purposes

Our writing curriculum is fully aligned with the National Curriculum for English including writing composition, vocabulary, grammar & punctuation for each year group. Each writing unit is progressively structured and centred around the different writing purposes: to entertain; to inform; to persuade; to discuss. The writing purposes are progressively sequenced across the school (see below). Through writing units, we focus on the purpose and audience for the children's writing in order for the children to make informed choices about the content, structure and language of their work.

Years 1 and 2

The children are always encouraged to write for an authentic audience and are introduced to the concept of writing to entertain and to inform their readers.  Alongside their growing knowledge of how sounds are represented in writing (grapheme-phoneme correspondence, or GPCs), the children learn how to use this knowledge to write a wider range of vocabulary to support their own compositions. For children in Year 1, simple sentence structure is emphasised, along with use of spaces between words, capital letters and full stops, to help the reader know where one idea ends and another begins. For children in Year 2, they are taught how to join their ideas to create greater variety and interest for the reader. The children will also start to extend the range of punctuation applied by using question marks and exclamation marks in their writing. Children in Year 2 are introduced to using a comma to separate items in a list and apostrophes to show where letters are missing (contraction) or singular possession. A range of wider vocabulary is taught and encouraged within the children’s writing, to support more detailed description, along with the use of adjectives and adverbs to add detail to nouns and verbs. They will become familiar with a range of genres, such as narratives, recipes, letters and explanations, and enjoy playing with language whilst writing their own poetry. 

Years 3 and 4

The children consolidate their understanding of writing to entertain and to inform. For children in Year 3, they will be introduced to writing to persuade for the first time. In doing so, they will develop a keener awareness of the reader, by considering how to move and convince their audience to act and/or change their mind. They will revisit learning from key stage one to ensure that they are familiar with simple sentence structure and build upon this by using a greater range of conjunctions to join their ideas in writing. Accurate punctuation of dialogue is introduced in Year 3/4, along with the use of prepositions and adverbs to tell the reader when, where and how things happened. The children will also learn how to structure their writing, by including paragraphs and/or headings and subheadings to support the reader to navigate the writing more effectively.  Children in Year 4 are also taught about a greater variety of ways to begin sentences, such as with a fronted adverbial to link back to a previous sentence or paragraph and/or to move the writing on for the reader. A greater range and/or usage of punctuation is taught to children in Year 4, such as the use of a comma to separate groups of words or phrases within a sentence and the use of an apostrophe to signify plural possession. 

Years 5 and 6

The children are introduced to writing to discuss for the first time. They will also spend time writing to entertain, inform and persuade, and enjoy building upon their knowledge of these writing purposes, selecting from a wider range of sophisticated language choices based on their intended effect on the reader. Children in Year 5/6 will be encouraged to continually review and refine their writing, based on their understanding of how to use and manipulate grammar and vocabulary to achieve their desired effect. A wider range of punctuation is introduced in order to achieve this. They are encouraged to focus on cohesion (making sure that the ideas within the writing link and flow) within and across paragraphs. Children in Year 6 will be encouraged to experiment more widely with their sentence structure, according to the needs of their reader, and be introduced to more sophisticated grammatical choices. The range of formality required for the audience will also become a significant element of the children’s decision-making process. In order to ensure that the children can be independent writers and showcase their talents for writing, they are provided with time and choice to support their selection of subject matter within their compositions and apply their learning within extended written outcomes.

Assessment of Writing

Writing is teacher-assessed throughout the term. Longer pieces of children's writing are used to inform end-of-term judgements using assessment criteria for each year group based on the National Curriculum.

This is what our children say about Writing in our school...

'I enjoy writing for different people like friends in my class. It is fun to read my writing to them.' Year 2

'When we explore books similar to what we are writing about, it helps me to create my own ideas for my writing.' Year 4

I really like comparing my writing from the start to the end of my learning. It always improves because my teacher helps us to put the right tools in our writing.' Year 3

'Learning lots about spelling and sentences has helped me get better in all of my writing - even in History, Geography and Science.' Year 6

'Our writing walls help me to select grammar and vocabulary that is best for my own writing.' Year 5