Writing
Writing at St George's
Our curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes. We encourage writing through all curriculum areas and use quality reading texts to model examples of good writing. Writing is taught through a number of different strategies. We believe that children need lots of rich speaking and drama activities to give them the imagination and the experiences that will equip them to become good writers.
Handwriting
From Year 2 it is a requirement that all children join their handwriting. Below is a table to show the order in which handwriting is taught in year 2. Attached to the bottom of this page are some documents that can support your child's handwriting at home.
Sentence Stacking
The Write Stuff is a method of teaching which our staff use to model writing using a systematic approach. The units of work link to a quality text and support children to create their own pieces of independent writing. The children learn about different types of sentences using the FANTASTICs. They are taught that writing composition is a sequence of different types of sentences built up over time. A typical lesson focuses on three main sentence structures and children experiment with language, order and composition to create their own chunks of writing. Here you can see an example of how that stacking looks in a Year 6 book:
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Here is an example of sentence stacking in Year 2. All of the sentences have been produced by the children and stacked to create a story. The children then move onto independent writing where they can really showcase their newly-acquired writing skills.
Editing
Great writers always read and edit as they work. We encourage this at St George's and provide time for children to reread and check writing using a green pen and our editing codes. You can see our editing codes in our school's assessment policy. By involving children in their writing process in this way, we hope to develop reflective and independent writers.
Pupils also have opportunities to uplevel and improve work and this is something that is modelled by teachers. You might see this in books as paper flaps over work or as sentences that have been rewritten in green pen. Again, by encouraging children to reread and redraft work, we are aiming for highly competent writers with high expectations for themselves.