Writing
At Malpas Alport, our overarching aim is to equip children with the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to communicate fluently and confidently for a range of purposes. We recognise that being able to write well is vital for a child’s prospects at school and in life. We are determined to teach every child to write regardless of social and economic circumstances, ethnicity, language spoken at home, and most special educational needs or disabilities. We aim to ensure all of our children develop a genuine love of language and the written word through taking a text-based approach to teaching writing.
We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme ‘Pathways to Write.’ Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the writing activities provided. Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Write approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary. You will find the end of year expectations for writing, reading and spoken language for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.
Within writing sessions, children are taught a range of skills in order for them to develop as confident writers.
Planning – Looking at real texts, children are taught different features of types of text and how to plan both orally and written.
Structure – Children are taught to write cohesively within a range of texts.
Vocabulary – Using awareness of the reader, children are taught to use a range of adventurous language.
Grammar – Children are taught to construct sentences which are grammatically correct.
Punctuation – Children are taught to use accurate and increasingly higher level punctuation including punctuation to create specific effect.
Spelling – In accordance with their age and ability, children are taught different spelling strategies to improve their writing.
Handwriting – Children are taught to form letters correctly according to the school handwriting policy.