“Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.”

Pam Allyn

Our writing curriculum is centred around the use of high-quality novels, non-fiction texts and picture books to inspire our children to become inventive authors and writers in line with our vision for the pupils to love learning. We believe that teaching the children to love writing is vital if they are to feel motivated to challenge themselves and produce engaging writing of their own.

The careful choice of novels is extremely important to us as we ensure that they are suited to the current classes, engage the pupils, address moral issues and link with other areas of the curriculum. Furthermore, we ensure, when we select the texts, that they will challenge the pupils by extending their vocabulary and providing a model to build on. These texts are shared with the children, discussed and used to inspire their writing. These are also supported by the provision of skilfully crafted modelled writes, which support them when working independently. Our text-based curriculum is also supported by the use of picture books to inspire children to write innovative and engaging stories on a weekly basis. We find that these books are extremely valuable in motivating the children and making them want to write.

The grammatical accuracy of children’s writing is also supported by the use of these high quality models of writing. However, the children are also taught the spelling and grammatical elements of writing during discreet sessions which are taught in a practical way to ensure the children master these skills. These grammatical elements are then reinforced through all the writing they produce during the week.

At St Chad’s, our focus on cross-curricular work ensures that all pupils see the purpose of their writing and that the links between writing and other aspects of the curriculum are always clear. These texts have a clear real world purpose and are used to link to the children’s learning in lessons such as, Geography, History, Religious Education, Science, Art and many others.

Overall, our children are provided with a rich text based approach to writing which focuses on grammatical skills, high quality model texts and on providing clear cross-curricular writing opportunities.