In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality texts – ranging from picture books to long narratives, immersive real-life experiences, such as school trips, or a combination of both.
Throughout their time at the school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, discursive texts, persuasive arguments, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing.
Throughout the Early Years and Key Stage 1 children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later on. An emphasis is placed on developing clear handwriting with ‘finger spaces’ between in each word. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their work, whether it be fiction writing or a set of instructions. Our curriculum teaches the children to add variation and description to their work by developing their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers. By the end of Key Stage 1 children have been taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar. This structural and technical knowledge is fostered alongside developing a love for writing as a lifelong means for communication and expressing oneself.
As pupils writing journey continues, we use a range of resources to stimulate and inspire ideas through ‘Read-Write-Perform’ and writing linked with pupils wider curriculum work which forms a ‘Learning Challenge.’ This allows developing writers at Red Lane Primary School to use meaningful contexts to understand how we use the English language. Pupils are then taught how to apply that knowledge creatively to bring their own work to life. When writing using the ‘Learning Challenge’, the starting point is excellent quality literature to link the English learning with a specific history or geography focus. For example, ‘Lila and the secret of rain’ helps us focus on ‘a non-European country and compare it with our town or village’; the book ‘Viking Boy’ brings the Viking period to life. Focus History/ Geography is designed in such a way to ensure that the integrity of English, history and geography remain whilst providing natural links between them. The knowledge, skills and understanding of both English, history and geography are therefore of paramount importance as is the pedagogy that underpins the suggested activities.
Our English overviews can be viewed here:
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6