Writing
Writing at Little Digmoor plays a vital role in our curriculum and is central to teaching and learning throughout the school. With endless amounts of cross-curricular links, it is a chance for children to use their imagination and be creative with their thoughts and ideas.
We believe that children have the opportunities to write about a wide range of contexts – exploring story genres as well as writing about local, national and global issues therefore children having a real purpose for writing.
Children begin their journey to becoming a writer in EYFS and throughout each year, develop their confidence, skills and abilities as they reach year 6. Our curriculum is progressive and offers children many opportunities to shine. Because we believe in reinforcing key learning, we have developed a spiralled curriculum so the key skills are continuously revisited throughout each year group
How is writing taught?
English lessons
For English lessons at Little Digmoor, we use the Pathways to Writing scheme. This scheme is used throughout our school from year 1 through to year 6 to enthuse and engage the children through the love of books. Each year group has six units to teach which encompass all of the key writing skills for each year group. A combination of sentence composition, grammar, punctuation and aspects of spelling are delivered in each unit.
Spelling
In Early Years Foundation Stage and year 1, the spelling of words is taught in combination with reading through the Little Wandles Phonics Scheme. However in year 2, the children are taught spelling through the Little Wandles spelling scheme. In key stage two, children are taught spelling through a scheme called Spelling Shed. Within each year group, there are statutory words that children must learn to spell as well as learning about different spelling rules and patterns in order to be competent spellers when they are writing.
Handwriting
Children develop and progress their handwriting skills throughout their time in school. They will learn to form lower and upper case letters, write in an appropriate size to eventually being able to learn joining of letters to result in a fluent cursive style. All children develop their skills at different rates so we work very hard to ensure all children make sufficient progress and where appropriate deliver interventions.