Writing
Writing is a key skill that we want all our children to develop; it has the power not only to entertain but to inform, explain and inspire.
In EYFS, children begin to recognise the value of using marks to communicate. During Foundation 1, children develop their coordination alongside their gross and fine motor skills to enable them to control a writing manipulative to form letter shapes. This is built on, during Foundation 2, through children refining these skills and furthering their phonics knowledge to enable them to write phonetically words, and then sentences.
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Writing in KS1 and KS2 is taught through carefully-chosen, high-quality stimuli, including classic and modern texts and thought-provoking film. A wide variety of different genre writing is also supported through our cross-curricular approach. For example, in Year 5, children write a newspaper recount of Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest as part of their geography-focused unit on mountains. Meanwhile, in Year 3, children write a non-chronological report about ancient Egypt as they study this period in history.
For full details of how we explore each genre and the associated texts, please use the links below.
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Long Term Plan (writing) 2023-2024
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At the beginning of the writing sequence, children will explore the stimuli in depth whilst also learning about the purpose, structures, ideas and themes of the genre involved. Children will then receive instruction in the necessary content, vocabulary and grammar through extended modelling and practice.
To discover more about progression in punctuation and grammar for our KS2 children, please follow this link.
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Teachers and children will agree what a successful piece of writing looks like and the success criteria for a piece of work is then provided to the children based on this. These success criteria are also the means through which feedback is given to the child and, in KS2, inform the setting of targets.
Learners will have the opportunity to review their work through whole class feedback or smaller group support (from as early as summer, Year 1). We ensure that 1:1 feedback is provided, where needed, so children understand how and why improvements can be made.
Children are taught to edit and improve their work – as all successful writers do - and they do this with increasing independence as they move through school due to their understanding of our feedback policy.
Final, independent pieces of work allow their teachers to judge how confidently the children have applied the vocabulary, sentence structures and text features taught. From these, Good examples of each piece of writing are 'published' in a class book, which is included in the class library; this allows children the experience being an author.
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To find out more about how children are supported to develop as writers at Lantern Lane, please follow this link to our progression document. The subject policy for English can also be found here.
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Writing progress is supported through the teaching and practice of handwriting, grammar & punctuation and spelling. Please use the previous links to discover how these areas are taught at Lantern Lane.
See our handwriting policy, which explains how handwriting is taught and practised at Lantern Lane.
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