Writing

Our school vision ‘Curious Minds, Open Hearts & Joy of Learning’ is at the heart of all we do. 

Curious Minds-  Our writing sessions make links across our wider curriculum, prompting children to make connections in their learning, in turn giving opportunities to apply specific vocabulary in context and embedding knowledge into our long-term memories.

Open Hearts - Our writing curriculum immerses children in a wide range of genres, provides opportunities to write for different purposes and audiences. Similarly to our reading spine, model texts explore themes of diversity, social issues and big ethical questions.

Joy of Learning – Like all of our CUSP sessions, writing lessons provide many opportunities for oracy, allowing children to work collaboratively and  explore their creative minds.

Our writing curriculum

In our EYFS and Key Stage 1 classes, inspirational writing areas have been created, to encourage children to develop a love of writing.

From Year 1 upwards, the CUSP curriculum is taught, which carefully builds and sequences units, ensuring coverage of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Our Year 1 children take part in small group sessions which ensure that written work, spelling, phonics, grammar and punctuation are developed gradually through children’s writing.

Writing sessions in Year 2 are taught daily, on a bi-weekly basis. This goes hand in hand with the CUSP reading curriculum and allows children to really gain a depth of understanding of the genre they are studying.  Children in KS2 take part in daily writing sessions that follow the CUSP curriculum. All writing sequences are planned to take 2-3 weeks, to ensure that writing is of a high quality and to ensure children are taught the range of skills needed for the specific writing genre, as well as giving them time to practice and apply these new skills. 

Our writing lessons are taught in six steps. In each session, you could expect to see…

Each units provides:

• A knowledge organiser, where children can see examples and definitions of the vocabulary and skills they will need to apply to be successful in the unit.
•  A knowledge note for each session, to show examples specific to the skills being taught.
• Opportunities to see skills applied within a text and being modelled through high-quality teaching.
• Opportunities to work collaboratively, produce shared writing and build confidence to apply skills independently.
• A model text, which is used as an example of grammatical structures, vocabulary, presentation and organisation, but most of all used to frame children’s thinking, building their confidence and competence when writing.
• ‘Ingredients for success’ checklists which allow children to provide examples of where they have applied the skills they have learnt.

Units taught:

Units are purposely revisited during the school year (A&B). This enables children to revisit learning for consolidation, deepening understanding and application of skills learnt in a different context.

Strong Start Writing

Strong start writing units are used at the start of the academic year to focus on the specific teaching of sentence composition. We believe that great writing is built on great sentences and a strong start with this lays good foundations for great writing outcomes.  Teachers are able to identify misconceptions and target support where needed.