Writing

At Hose C of E, we follow a book based English curriculum. Core texts are identified for each half term that are used as the stimulus for a range of writing outcomes across 4 different main purposes: Discuss, Entertain, Inform and Persuade. Our English Curriculum is taught over 2 years across Cycle A and Cycle B, during which children revisit these writing purposes and outcomes and build on what they know and can do to produce a range of quality pieces of writing. Children are taught to plan, draft and edit their work and create final pieces to ‘publish’, producing work to showcase and be proud of. We adopt key strategies from the Talk 4 Writing approach around the modelling and scaffolding of writing in a way that supports children to identify key features of a text and build on their ideas to write with confidence and creativity.

Whilst some of the core texts create fantastic links with the wider curriculum, their main purpose is as a vehicle to drive pupil’s knowledge of how and why we write, the English language and understanding of literature. We have carefully chosen quality texts for study and as part of our wider reading offer such as our class novels and poetry texts, with a range of modern and classics written by diverse authors. In this way, the children are able to create deeper links with learning, acquire and use subject specific vocabulary more widely and can become more deeply immersed in their writing for purpose and pleasure. We believe it is important that children understand that writing is not just for English, but is an important tool across the curriculum and, more importantly, in life. We know that children who read more, write more and write better (Young and Ferguson, 2020) so our book-based curriculum creates ideal links for our writing and reading for pleasure pedagogy.

Oracy

As such, our expectations of writing are high across the curriculum, not just in English. When it comes to writing, oral composition is just as important as written composition. We teach children both to read and write and so too should we teach them to speak. We recognise the crucial nature of spoken language and our role to develop it in school. As such, we are continuing to develop our school approach to oracy and embedding this within and wider than our English curriculum.

Spelling

Spelling is as part of the Sounds-Write programme, established as part of Phonics teaching in KS1 and built upon in KS2 to develop spelling fluency. Our whole school approach to spelling can be seen in the documents section below.

Handwriting

Handwriting is taught using the Nelson Handwriting scheme from EYFS to KS2. As with Spelling, this is a whole school approach with a focus on developing fluency in Handwriting.