Subject Leader: Mr Earley
Our Curriculum Drivers
Intent
We have designed our literacy curriculum to engage all children in the writing process. We want children to develop a life-long love of writing, as well as the key writing skills needed as they progress through education. With this aim, our curriculum is designed around lessons that engage children in high-quality texts, as well as teaching them the necessary grammatical skills to write successfully for a range of purposes. Through literacy lessons, children are directly taught carefully considered ambitious vocabulary, which they can use creatively in writing and confidently in conversation.
Implementation
High-quality texts are at the heart of our literacy curriculum and each year group has six texts that they focus on throughout the year. These have been carefully selected from the books recommended by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s (CLPE) ‘Power of Reading’ Scheme. When selecting these texts, consideration was given to ensuring that the authors, characters, settings and themes reflect the wide diversity of our school community, so that all children see themselves, their families and cultures in the books that they study.
Literacy lessons follow a four-stage sequence that builds up to a final published outcome. This sequence begins with the children exploring a text, including gaining background knowledge and an understanding of its themes. These lessons may involve reading the text, exploring illustrations, drawing/annotating, creating mind maps and carrying out research. This is followed by lessons that focus on developing the children’s spoken language, communication and vocabulary (oracy). In these lessons, the children will learn more about the text and develop their responses to it through taking part in discussions and debates, drama activities and giving presentations. This is followed by lessons that that directly teach the grammar and punctuation features of the particular text type and how to use these successfully. Activities in these lessons often involve short form writing, cloze activities and quizzes. The final lessons build upon the previous stages to support the children to write, edit and publish an extended piece of writing that suits their purpose and audience. Children are always given a purpose for publishing their writing and a choice about how to best achieve this.
Handwriting
At St Mary’s, handwriting is taught in Early Years and KS1. In Early Years, the children begin by learning to form un-joined lowercase letters using the Rocket Phonics Sound and Letter formation mats. In Year 1 the children are taught to form their lessons in a pre-cursive style. From Year 2 onwards, when the children are ready, they begin to join the letters and develop an effective cursive style of handwriting.
Spelling
In EYFS and KS1 the children have two phonics lessons focusing on segmenting words using the phonics sounds they have learnt.
From Year 2 upwards the children are set weekly spellings on Seesaw based on a phoneme and the different graphemes uses to represent it. e.g. /ai/ spelt angel, hay and rain. They participate in a weekly spelling test and their scores are shared with parents on Seesaw.
Impact
Our Writing curriculum should ensure that children leave St Mary’s:
- With a life-long love of writing
- As competent writers who can access a wide range of literature
- Able to reference a range of different authors and texts
- Having made the best possible progress as a result of consistent, quality first teaching
How to support your child at home?
We believe the home school partnership is essential in developing a child’s reading and writing engagement, ability and stamina. You can support your child at home by:
- Practising spellings regularly at home
- Practising your child’s handwriting regularly
- Encouraging your child to write for a range of purposes e.g. a thank you for a present, a daily diary, story writing.
- Reading a range of books at home to your child e.g. poetry, biographies, fact books etc.
