Writing at St Gerard’s Catholic Primary School

“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis

Vision Statement for Writing 

At St. Gerard’s It is our vision that every child will learn to become a confident writer by being given, exciting opportunities to engage, support and challenge them.

Intent

We believe that all pupils should be able, irrespective of background or ability, to confidently communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions through their writing. 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 them to write clearly, accurately, coherently, and creatively, adapting their language and style for a range of meaningful contexts, purposes and audiences.
Handwriting, spelling and grammar will be explicitly taught to ensure that children are able to understand the conventions of writing and manipulate language to create effects for the reader.

At St. Gerard’s, we aim to provide our pupils with a varied high-quality, challenging English curriculum that supports pupils to speak, read and write with fluency so that they can communicate ideas and emotions to others effectively.

In order to support our children to communicate, we  provide them with varied opportunities and purposes to write across the curriculum.  We do this is through a progressive curriculum that considers all aspects of writing: composition; spelling and phonics; grammar and punctuation; and handwriting.

Children are exposed to a wide variety of genres both in fiction and non-fiction and use their skills to plan, write, edit and evaluate their writing.

Implementation

In EYFS, our children are given the opportunity to mark make from day 1. They are given opportunities to develop a love of writing within a context and for a purpose.

From Year 1 onwards, our children are provided with quality writing lessons that follow the CUSP Curriculum Increased Frequency Model.

Please see below for long term plans for each year group for writing.

Impact

When pupils leave our school, our English curriculum will have ensured that they have
developed quality communication skills and a life-long love of reading and writing.
The majority of pupils will achieve age related expectations in English and clear progress will
be evident.
They will have firm foundations in English and will be well placed to make good progress at
Key Stage 3.