Writing

At St Nicholas’ writing is a crucial part of our curriculum and it is our aim to provide pupils with a high-quality education that will teach and encourage our pupils to speak, read and write fluently, so that they can communicate their ideas effectively with others. Our writing curriculum aims to develop children’s enjoyment in writing. We strive to equip our children, from as early as the Early Years, with the tools to construct and structure their writing, so it is understood by others, whilst giving them a purpose to write. Within Foundation and Key Stage One, we follow the Read, Write, Inc scheme, which allows our children to develop secure levels of phonetic knowledge, allowing them to segment accurately, whilst also developing a secure understanding of the basics of writing, including handwriting, basic punctuation and sentence structure. 

Within the writing curriculum, we promote the skills of drafting and editing, whilst focusing on the explicit teaching of spelling, grammar and handwriting to secure children’s technical skills.  From Year 2 upwards, we strive for our writing curriculum to promote creativity and passion towards literature. Writing is based around a book or stimulus; links are often made across the curriculum to join up learning and make writing meaningful. Writing is promoted across the curriculum with opportunities for extensive writes provided.  We provide opportunities for peer and self-assessment, which help the children to look for ways to improve their writing and recognise where they have been successful.

Writing Long Term Plan (LTP)

Click on the link below to find the writing LTP for the whole school: 

Handwriting

Handwriting is a taught skill that develops at different rates for different children. All of the teachers in the school put a priority on teaching handwriting and have high expectations for handwriting across the curriculum. Our school uses Penpals for Handwriting to ensure that:

• The importance of handwriting is recognised and given appropriate time.
• The progression of handwriting is consistent across the school.
• Handwriting is acknowledged to be a whole body activity and emphasis is placed on correct posture and pencil grip for handwriting.
• Expectations of left-handed children are equal to those of right-handed children, and appropriate advice and resources are available to ensure that they learn to write with a comfortable, straight wrist.
• Handwriting is linked into grammar, punctuation and spelling in order to practice and contextualise all of the transcriptional and stylistic skills for writing.
• Children learn to self-assess their own writing and develop understanding and responsibility for improving it.
• Children learn to write in different styles for different purposes such as print for labelling a diagram, illustrated capitals letters for creating a poster, swift jottings for writing notes, making a ‘best copy’ for presentation and fast, fluent and legible writing across the curriculum.

Spelling

Spellings across school are taught according to the rules and words contained in Appendix 1 of the English National Curriculum. We use the National Curriculum as a guideline as to which spellings should be taught in which year group and use resources to support this taken from Spelling Shed.

Spelling is taught explicitly once a week with two additional opportunities for spelling practice and then a spelling review once a week. Each session should last approximately 15 minutes. The children will receive 10 spellings to learn on a Monday, this will include the 9 new spellings for the week and 1 spelling from the previous week. This is to ensure retrieval practice. Within spelling sessions, we use spelling strategies taken from Spelling Shed. This practice will be completed in the children’s spelling journals.

The spelling review will take place every Friday morning. Once referred to as the weekly spelling ‘test’ staff will now refer to it as a weekly spelling’ review’. In this session the 10 spellings that the children have been learning will be reviewed.

A spelling LTP for each year group can be found below here. 

Poetry

The DfE Reading Framework (2023) emphasises the importance of exposing children to a range of high-quality poetry to develop their language comprehension and enjoyment of reading .

Each half term, each class will spend one week using a poem as their fluency text.

Below is a curated selection of poetry collections suitable for each year group from Reception to Year 6:

Assessment

At St Nicholas Catholic Primary School, we use a structured approach to assess writing that supports progress and celebrates achievement. Throughout each writing topic, children complete a series of incidental writes—short, focused pieces that help them practise specific skills and techniques linked to the unit’s final piece. These tasks build confidence and prepare pupils for their independent write, which takes place at the end of each topic and demonstrates their overall understanding and progress.

Before writing, children are introduced to the success criteria for the specific writing outcome and know what they are aiming to achieve. They regularly use self- and peer-assessment to reflect on their work against four or five key objectives, helping them take ownership of their learning and identify next steps for improvement.

Teachers use their professional judgement to assess each child’s writing, considering evidence from across the topic. This is supported by termly moderation, where teachers work together to ensure consistency and accuracy in assessment. Writing is assessed against the National Curriculum objectives, which include spelling, grammar, punctuation, composition, and handwriting.

Through this approach, we ensure that every child is supported to make sustained progress and develop as a confident, capable writer.

We use an ongoing process of assessment for writing at St Nicholas. We use a range of methods to support our assessment of children’s writing:

• Use of writing success criteria
• Peer assessment
• Self-assessment
• Marking of work (refer to marking policy)
• Termly moderation conversations
• Monitoring sheet of writing objectives at the back of the book

National Curriculum link: English National Curriculum