Writing
Subject Leader: Mrs R Adams
At Martin Frobisher Infant School we aim for all of our children to be able to confidently communicate their ideas and creativity through their writing.
We provide learners with a high quality writing curriculum which enables children to use their phonetic skills, a wide range of vocabulary, knowledge of spelling and grammar and their creative thinking to write in a variety of text styles and for a range of purposes.
Our Writing Curriculum
Our writing curriculum is built on our systematic and synthetic phonics programme, an enriched reading curriculum and also well-planned opportunities for children to develop their talk and vocabulary. Our teaching is centred around the foundations for writing, for example, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation, which children will built upon year by year. Our phonics programme enables children to learn, practice and apply tricky words and spelling patterns which can then be applied independently. If children secure these fundamentals then they can go on to become fluent and accurate writers.
Our Writing Curriculum
In the Early Years writing is purely phonetic based and develops as our children build on their bank of sounds and words. We teach writing through modelling and scaffolding the skills of segmenting and letter formation and a carefully planned learning environment which gives children lots of opportunities to apply their writing for a purpose.
In Key Stage One we follow Pathways to Write which is a scheme carefully designed for children to build on their writing skills throughout a unit of work. These units are centred around high quality texts to ensure engaging and purposeful writing lessons for our young children which deepen vocabulary, reading and writing skills through a mastery approach. Children will be exposed to many text types and will experience writing in a variety of styles and for a range of purposes.
Our learners will collect writing 'keys' which will be the focus skill for that unit and taken from the National Curriculum.
Handwriting
From Nursery to Year Two we have high expectations of handwriting and presentation. Through the Early Years our children develop their gross and fine motor skills through carefully planned provision so they have the strength and coordination to form all letters correctly by the end of Reception. In Key Stage One we teach pre-cursive letter formation with intervention for fine motor control if this is something key children still need. We use the Little Wandle Letters and sounds mnemonics for letter formation.
