Writing at Five Lanes Primary School

At Five Lanes Primary we provide opportunities for children to write for a variety of purposes including: instructions, stories, poetry, explanations and even letters to Santa! Through use of Talk 4 Writing and Literacy and Language, children learn to plan, draft, edit and present their work. Letter formation is taught from Nursery and we encourage children to write neatly, in a legible style using cursive script.

Foundation Stage and Year 1

In Nursery, Reception and Year 1 we use Pie Corbett’s Talk 4 Writing as a tool for teaching English.  This follows a three-week cycle in which children imitate a text, innovate a text and then invent their own text:

• Imitate – learn and retell texts following creation of text map so that children have a bank of tales they know by heart.
• Innovate – adapting a known story or text in order to create a new one based on the imitated text.
• Invent – drawing upon the range of stories and texts learned to create something new.

 Talk 4 Writing consists of book talk, writer talk, learning and remembering texts. Through use of text maps, painting, drawing, teacher modelling of the story/text, discussion, drama, role play, retelling, memory tricks and games. For children in Foundation Stage and Year 1, this approach allows children to internalise language patterns, build blocks of narrative, internalise the flow and pattern of sentences and vocabulary, and then to reuse them as an independent writer. Alongside Talk 4 Writing, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Children are taught each of the phases and learn how the different phase sounds are applied in order to spell different words.

Year 2 through to Year 6

In Years 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 we use the Ruth Miskin Literacy and Language writing scheme. There are 6 teaching units spread across the year, with each unit covering a fiction and non-fiction based genre. This allows children to experience a wide variety of rich and purposeful fiction and non-fiction text types. Teaching these units stimulates and challenges children’s thinking as well as further developing their skills and knowledge in reading comprehension, critical thinking, spoken language and enhancing their knowledge of grammar and use of vocabulary. Literacy and Language builds upon the children’s existing skills and experiences of Foundation Stage and Year 1 as it also follows a three-layered approach:

• Week 1 Reading fiction
• Week 2 Writing fiction
• Week 3 Reading and writing non-fiction.

Every child has a Literacy and Language homework book which provides further practice and consolidation of the grammar associated with each teaching unit and the writing tasks.