We provide daily opportunities for children to learn how to spell. Beyond this, we know that children need to learn the skills of being a writer and to allow this to happen, we run daily English lessons. Children are introduced to texts – fiction and non-fiction (including photographs and video clips) – around all sorts of themes and ideas. Any text is appropriate (including photographs and video clips) as long as it does one job in particular: Out intent is to inspire children to write. All children have writing targets which enable them to focus on the particular writing skills they need to develop. The teaching of these skills is at the heart of each literacy unit, with short writing opportunities throughout, building up to a final piece of writing inspired by the text/s studied. We follow ‘talk for writing’ as a planning model, which means children plan and rehearse their writing verbally, through pictures and images, embedding the structure of sentences before they attempt to write them for themselves. Click here to read our teaching sequence for writing. Click here for our English overview which identifies text types, opportunities for building skills and potential links to the wider curriculum. We are still developing this so we can include a wider range of texts to further develop the link between English and the wider curriculum.
"I love how writing helps you express yourself." "It is easier to write when we use a book to help our ideas." "I like to write by myself because it helps me concentrate and there is less distraction."