Writing at Wynndale Primary School

Writing is a key priority at Wynndale Primary School. As a school, our aim is to develop a love of writing, through purposeful, exciting and engaging stimuli. These allow children to learn key writing skills, develop their vocabulary and embed their spelling, punctuation and grammar. Children have the opportunity to write a wide genre of text types and are encouraged to plan, orally rehearse, write, reflect and improve their writing. One way of enabling children to engage with writing is through our writing sequence approach, where the children focus on a range of carefully selected narrative, non-fiction and poetry texts as a stimulus for writing.

These key texts will form the focus to a half term writing sequence for both Key Stage 1 and 2. The first stage in our sequence is to immerse the children in the text through drama, art, music and real-life experiences. Through the analysis stage we explore the features of the text and the choices the author has made to make it successful. From this we build a toolkit in the author’s style. The children are then taught the skills needed to be able to use the toolkit to influence their own writing. The children then begin to plan their own piece of writing before becoming authors and using their plan to write. They have the opportunity to correct spellings, improve their vocabulary choices or up-level their sentences during the editing stage. Children are given time to redraft their work by adding in anything from previous editing and improvement sessions. Finally, the children publish their writing in a final draft. To celebrate their writing efforts, publications will be shared in a Writing Celebration at the end of this sequence.

The sequence for writing is reflected in all classrooms through their English Working Wall.

A hugely important aspect of writing is spelling, punctuation and grammar. Children are taught spelling rules through a set of discrete spelling lessons throughout the week. Year 2 onwards use the No nonsense Spelling scheme as a basis for these lessons. FS and Key Stage 1 focus on learning to spell key words.  Spelling prompts are found in each classroom.

Throughout this process and across the whole curriculum, we use the handwriting scheme ‘Letterjoin’ to develop neat and joined up handwriting.