Writing
Writing is a complex skill for children to learn and it involves applying many concepts, skills and knowledge all at once. We hope that by sharing with you how we teach the children to write, and by giving you some ideas of what you can do at home to help, we can continue to improve writing at our school.
We try to make the teaching of writing as fun and relevant for the children as possible, ensuring that we cover a variety of topics and genres. Children will engage more fully with a writing task if they can see a clear purpose behind it, for example, writing recipes that they will cook later in the week, stories to read to younger children or recounts of events they have taken part in.
What does writing involve?
Research has shown that young children go through the following 7 developmental steps when learning to write:
- Drawing & sign writing
- Letter like forms
- Copied letters
- Child’s name and string of letters
- Words
- Sentences
- Text
In order to become an effective writer, children need to learn to transcribe and compose. Within the Foundation Stage and early Key Stage 1, we focus on oral composition and rehearsal whilst teaching the skills of transcription, mainly through the teaching of phonics and handwriting skills. As children move through Years 1 and 2 we begin to develop their written composition skills, whilst extending and consolidating their phonic knowledge. Writing also involves many complex physical skills and therefore in the Foundation Stage the teaching of writing also includes lots of gross, medium and fine motor activities, both indoors and outdoors, to help develop the fine pencil control necessary to form letters.
When we plan for teaching writing we use the objectives from the New National Curriculum and the Letters and Sounds Document as a basis. We also use our own framework ‘Getting Writing Right’ to help ensure a clear progression throughout school in developing the necessary skills. The teaching of phonics is supported by the use of Jolly Phonics and you can find out more about the teaching of phonics by visiting the Reading section on our website.
The teaching of writing is supported by regular assessments, which are used to identify areas for development for individual children, classes and year groups. To help us make our judgements we take into consideration the statements in the Development Matters document at Foundation Stage and the Target Tracker objectives based on teh New National Curriculum at Key Stage 1. These tell us what level a child is currently working at and what aspects or skills they need to work on next to make progress. You should be made aware of your child’s current writing target through their orange Learning Log. If you are unsure of what their target is, please write a note in the log or pop in and see the class teacher.
In KS1 there is now a very big focus on grammar and at the end of Y2 children will sit a grammar and spelling test set by the government. We have made a grammar booklet that will help you undertsand what your child has to learn by the end of each year: 'Grammar Booklet'
How you can help your child at home
- Read to them. Reading books to your child helps to develop their vocabulary and exposes them to the language they need to help compose their own writing.
- Talk to them. Talking to your child about what they are doing and seeing and what is happening around them will help to expand their vocabulary and model sentence construction for them which they will then begin to apply in their own talk, and eventually their writing.
- Model for them – let them see you writing. If your child sees that writing is something you do on a regular basis then they will want to do it too, they will see it as something important.
- Get them to help when you need to write – shopping lists, birthday and thank you cards, emails, texts etc.
- Ask your child to write sentences to caption family photos that can be put together in an album. Good practise for writing and a great keepsake too!
- Younger children – help them to develop their motor skills by activities such as painting, playdough, lego, jigsaws, cutting & sticking, chalk on the ground, throwing & catching. All these help to develop the skills that allow a child to effectively control a pencil for writing.
- Boys - it can be notoriously hard to engage some boys in wanting to write. Some ideas for making it more appealing can be to write on a large scale, use shaped paper, write outside or use mind mapping. It is also really important that they see male role models writing. The following link may be helpful : Parent Dish – boys writing
Listed below are links to a further selection of documents and websites that may help you with ideas for supporting your child with their writing at home.
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