Writing

At St Patrick’s, we are committed to ensuring that every child who attends our school leaves us with the key life skill of the ability to write. Our Writing curriculum follows the National Curriculum in its aims to ensure that all pupils:

• acquire a wide vocabulary
• acquire an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language 
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage 
• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences 
• use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas 
• are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate

In Reception and Key Stage 1, our high-quality delivery of Read Write Inc as a SSP programme sets strong foundations for our children as writers. As soon as they are ready, our children learn to form letters and practice them daily as well as using their segmenting and blending skills alongside their developing understanding of phonics code to spell words. Children are taught spelling in line with National Curriculum once their phonics knowledge is secure. We use Letterjoin as our handwriting scheme and a high standard of joined, cursive handwriting is taught from Year 2. High-quality handwriting is expected in all lessons. Alongside the high quality phonics, handwriting and spelling provision, English is taught daily in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. 

Our curriculum is carefully scaffolded to ensure children are exposed to writing a wide variety of text types, for a range of purposes, and teaches grammar skills progressively and creatively, providing plenty of opportunities for consolidation. We use a text-based approach and see lessons as a journey towards high quality writing outcomes, using a book as the theme with grammar elements interwoven into lessons. This is our reading through to writing cycle, shown in the graphic below. Each of our units begin with a ‘hook lesson’ to engage and inspire our young learners and provide a purpose and audience for their writing. Throughout Writing lessons, oracy is integral; many of our children’s speech and language development is significantly below their age expectation and a ‘Talk for Writing’ approach to teaching English enables children to develop their vocabulary and grammar skills before writing. All staff have been trained in ‘Talk for Writing’ and are supported by Romero planning teams and Romero Leading Practitioners in planning high-quality writing outcomes.

We are confident our pupils will leave St Patrick’s as assured writers who can apply their spelling and grammar knowledge to a wide variety of purposes, audiences, genres and text types and can communicate their thoughts coherently and effectively through written and oral forms. 

Handwriting Policy