St James Church
School
Writing
Our Writing Intent
At St James Church School, we aim to support children to develop a love of writing whilst being able to express their thoughts and ideas clearly and creatively through the written word.
We want all our children to see themselves as authors. Therefore the teaching of writing is focused around high quality texts with opportunities to write for a purpose for all children. We teach transcription skills such as handwriting and spelling systematically and rigorously. This is to ensure these are automatic for children freeing up their focus to be on the composition of their writing. Daily 'Writing for Accuracy' sessions enable children to practise these skills with orally dictated sentences.
Oracy skills looking at sentence construction, vocabulary choices and the use of varied language are embedded throughout all teaching at St James. This is a key driver for our daily lesson planning to support children's progress in writing.
Our children have opportunities to publish their writing and to celebrate their achievements and we welcome parents/carers in to see their incredible writing frequently.
Handwriting
We follow a consistent and thorough handwriting scheme that links with our early teaching of phonics. From the foundation stage focusing on fine motor skills to discrete handwriting practise in reception and beyond, we strive to get this right for all children as they start their writing journey.
When handwriting is fluent and effortless, it frees children up to think about what they want to write instead of how to write it.
Take a look at our handwriting progression from pre-school to Year 6:
/docs/Handwriting_Progression_ULS.pdf
Spelling
As with handwriting, we want all children to be competent and confident spellers to enable children to focus on composition of their writing.
Please see our phonics page to see how we teach the phonetic code and support all learners to gain a solid grounding in phonic awareness supporting accurate use of phonics in their writing. This includes daily practise for all children.
We continue to refer to phonics and recap prior learning as children move into Key Stage 2. The specific spelling rules from the National Curriculum are then taught systematically using Spelling Shed as an interactive and engaging resource.Progression of Skills
We strive to provide children with key transferrable writing and grammatical skills to build on each year in order to succeed as individuals.
As a school, we have created a skills progression document to support children with revisiting their prior learning, embedding new learning and have built-in opportunities to develop their cumulative knowledge and skills throughout their primary years.
Our skills progression is linked to quality texts, that are carefully chosen to teach specific skills, and throughout a teaching unit children have the opportunity to analyse the texts for features, embed their knowledge of these features through carefully chosen tasks and create their own final pieces of writing for an audience.
Our children have opportunities to publish their writing and to celebrate their achievements.
Please see our long term plan below.
Writing Long Term Plan
Below are our skills progression documents for Year 1 - Year 6 highlight what the children will focus on in each term. Anything highlighted green is new to the year group and so will have a more in-depth focus.
Year_1_Overview.Year_2_OvervieYear_3_OverviewYear_4_OverviYear_5_OverviewYear_6_Overview