Writing 

Pathways to Write is used across school to teach writing. Our writing curriculum enables children to read and write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within different subjects. Our writing scheme involves units of work which develop communication, vocabulary, reading and writing skills through a mastery approach. Skills are gradually built up through repetition within the units and children are given multiple opportunities to apply these skills in short bursts of writing before their final piece of writing at the end of the unit. The approach moves from dependence towards independence, with the teacher using shared and guided practice to develop the ability in children to write creatively and powerfully. The Gateway, Mastery and Feature keys alongside high-quality texts are used to help develop children’s discourse knowledge. Linking to our ‘Wonderful Words’ curriculum driver, throughout each unit, children have the opportunity to widen their vocabulary as this is a high priority at our school. It is developed explicitly across school to reduce the vocabulary gap. ‘Wonderful Word walls’, long, medium and short term planning, and the use of progression maps ensure that a variety of genres are progressively taught and built upon both throughout the year and throughout school. 

By beginning each year with ‘Place Value of Punctuation and Grammar’, we ensure direct teaching of sentence construction and grammar to allows pupils to use this with accuracy, confidence and increasing flair.  

Handwriting 

Children learn cursive handwriting, which teaches pupils to join letters and words as a series of flowing movements, patterns and lines. We encourage children to take pride in the presentation of their work and therefore approach it with a sense of enjoyment and achievement. Children will experience coherence and continuity in learning and teaching across foundation stage, key stage 1 and key stage 2.  A multi-sensory approach to handwriting will support the development of spelling.  
 

Spelling 

PHONICS 

Classes in KS2 follow a progressive spelling scheme from ‘EdShed’. Through exploring spelling patterns and rules, we aim to create confident and proficient spellers using a discrete teaching approach underpinned by phonics. 

Children are also taught to 

•  Spell accurately and identify reasons for mis-spellings. 

•  Proof-read their spellings 

•  Recognise and use word origins, families and roots to build their skills 

• Use dictionaries and thesauruses.