Our Writing Curriculum:

To ensure high quality teaching and learning of writing we follow Greg Bottrill's Drawing Club in Class R and 1, the Curious Quest in Y1,2,3,4 and Jane Considine's 'The Write Stufff' in Class 5 and 6.

Why do we use the Drawing Club in EYFS and Year 1?

Drawing Club is the approach we use in Reception and in the beginning of year 1 in our school to teach English It was created by a practitioner called Greg Bottrill and it brings the magic of story into the classroom. It is a way to share skills including fine motor, early writing, vocabulary , maths and most importantly, imagination and excitement!

Drawing Club is all about doing what is right for our children, to meet their needs and develop their interests. It is not a scheme. It is meant to be fun and exciting and give children the opportunity to explore a world of adventure so that they are fuelled ready to develop their writing skills as they move up through school. The great thing about Drawing Club is that anything can happen. The more the children hear different ideas, think of their own and talk about stories in a 'What if...' way, the more their imagination will ignite and they will become amazing little storytellers.

Why do we use The Curious Quests in Y1,2,3,4?

The Curious Quests is an immersive adventure into story, poetry, make-believe and gives children endless possibilities to invent, imagine and story dream. The Curious Quests combines short carpet sessions, group work and children exploring open-ended resources such as junk modelling, construction, playdough, role play and being outside. Curious Quests is embedded and transforms our English learning. The children use quests and key characters to provide joy in the learning of SPAG content as well as applying their phonic understanding too.

A Curious Quest lesson is structured as below:

Word bathing - Introducing vocabulary linked to or featuring in the text.

From the portal - Introducing the learning intention of the lesson and key messages from Professor Klunk.

Book Snuggle - Sharing of our key text/ SPAG feature

Model writing - Teacher-led modelling to demonstrate key learning intentions and foundations of writing

Focus and Inventing time - Children work with the support of a teacher/teaching assistant in writing-based activities while the other groups explore themes with open-ended resources. 

Why do we use 'The Write Stuff'?

In Year 5 and 6, we move our children onto “The Write Stuff” by Jane Constantine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing. ‘The Write Stuff’ follows a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’ which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.

This approach makes sure that all of our children are exposed to high quality texts that stimulate quality responses to reading, high quality writing and purposeful speaking and listening opportunities.  With modelling at the heart, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

Key benefits of The Write Stuff:

• Support for teachers so that they have a deeper and more flexible knowledge of sentence structure.
• Pupils who understand how to apply sentence scaffolds to their independent writing as they develop their expertise.
• Standards improve because many worked examples are provided over the year that extend understanding through a wide range of genres and non-fiction text types.
• Children have a clear view of what high quality writing looks like and their learning is structured clearly and misconceptions dealt with.
• Pupils know how to improve their writing and make it more focused and actionable feedback is provided to guide their learning.
• Children have a concept of how to build, plan and complete a piece of writing due to narrative maps and non-fiction shapes.
• Teachers have clear pathways of how to guide pupils in weak areas such as cohesion and paragraphs.

Spelling:

At Stratton, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The teaching of phonics is of high priority. We want pupils to acquire a wide vocabulary, a solid understanding of grammar and be able to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they learn throughout their time in primary school. We want this acquisition of knowledge and skills to support their understanding of reading, writing and spoken language.

Implementation

We maintain fidelity in the implementation of our phonics teaching by using the FFT Success For All Phonics programme which allows the pupils to learn phonics through a highly structured programme of daily lessons across Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One into Year 3 and 4, using a variety of fun activities in multi-sensory and systematic ways.

Each session gives an opportunity for pupils to revisit their previous experience, be taught new skills, practice together and apply what they have learnt and celebrate their achievements. Each session follows the teaching principles of:

• Revisit and Review
• Teach and Model
• Practise and Apply

Time is incorporated to allow for consolidation so that pupils can secure their skills, knowledge and understanding.

Reading materials support rapid and sustained progress and are carefully matched to the scope and sequence of the phonics programme. A comprehensive set of decodable readers are provided by the programme. These are used alongside additional reading materials that also match the sequence set out in the programme.

Spellings are learnt for Common Exception words (red words) in Early Years and Year 1, while Year Two, Three and Four learn particular spelling rules and strategies through the Spelling with the Jungle Club programme.

In Y5 and Y6 we use Emile spelling scheme. More details can be found here: https://emile-education.com/membership-login/free-spelling-scheme-of-work-members-home/ 

Handwriting:

Kinetic Letters is the handwriting programme that we follow at Stratton C of E Primary School. It is an evidence-informed programme that builds the cognitive and physical skills for handwriting. Once children’s writing becomes automatic, it frees up their ability to develop their creativity and write with increased confidence.

The programme follows four main threads:

• Making bodies stronger

• Holding the pencil

• Learning the letters

• Flow and fluency

Making bodies stronger: Children must have core body and arm strength to be able to control their fingers precisely and have the finger strength to write. The children carry out exercises to help strengthen their bodies.

 Holding the pencil: Children need to have a comfortable pencil grip that allows them to write for long periods. Children use the ‘three friends hold’ to grip their pencil, as this is proven to be the most efficient grip to write comfortably at length.

Learning the letters: When learning to form letters, the children begin with whole body movements and progress through  writing on whiteboards and finally writing on paper. In Kinetic Letters, all the letters and numbers are formed by starting at one of two monkeys, a brave one (Bounce) who goes to the top branch of the tree, and a scared one (Skip) who goes to the lower branch.  The letters are not learnt in alphabetical order. Instead, the are learnt in ‘families’, where the letters have been grouped according to how they are formed. Each letter has a rhyme that goes with it. The children follow the ‘move it, say it, write it’ approach to help remember the handwriting patterns off by heart.

Flow and fluency: Children work on producing letter movements that allow them to build stamina to write at length. This includes learning which letters can be joined and which letters are best left unjoined (break letters).