1. Writing

2. Our Aims
To engage and enthuse children about writing through exciting and relevant topics.
To provide children with the appropriate tools to enable them to write for real life audiences and purposes.

3. Our Curriculum
Our curriculum has five strands: Rule Britannia (history), World Awareness (geography), Global Accountability, Build and Create and Business Acumen.
We use texts linked to each topic to allow us to create cross curricular links.

4. Throughout Reception:
Children complete activities to develop their muscles ready for writing – chalking and painting.
We teach daily phonics sessions where children listen to the sounds in words and learn how to read and write them.
Children learn to “have a go” by practising their letter and word formation on whiteboards.
Children complete independent activities – role play area, writing corner and tracing.

5. Key skills for early writers
We encourage children to:
* Verbalise what they want to write.
* Begin each sentence with a capital letter.
* Form letters accurately using a precursive style.
* Use their phonic knowledge and high frequency words to build sentences.
* Use clear finger spaces to separate words.
* Punctuate using a full stop.
Evidence of recognisable letters, using initial sounds (h – have, b – blue), high frequency words ( I ) and CVC knowledge ( hat )

6. children should be able to:
By the end of Reception
children should be able to:
Correct pencil grip:
Handwriting
Write most lower case letters of the alphabet in precursive script.
Punctuation and grammar
Write a simple sentence with a capital letter and a full stop.
Leave spaces between words.

7. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 1
children should be able to:
Handwriting
Form all lower case letters correctly, making sure that they are the correct size and relative to one another.
Spelling
Spell words phonetically e.g.- sh-ee-p
Correctly spell some common exception words.
Punctuation and grammar
Use capital letters and full stops in some sentences.
Consistently use spaces between words.

9. By the end of Year 1

10. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 2
children should be able to:
Handwriting
Write capital letters and digits of the correct size and join letters in a cursive style.
Spelling
Spell many common exception words, some words with contracted forms (e.g. can’t and use some suffixes correctly e.g. –ment, -ness, -ful and –ly.)
Grammar
Link ideas together using subordinating conjunctions (when/if/that/because) and coordinating conjunctions (and/ but/ or).
Write different forms of sentences – commands, exclamations, questions and statements.
Use some expanded noun phrases e.g - the little mouse with the huge teeth.
Use present and past tense mostly correctly.
Punctuation
Use capital letters and full stops, question marks and exclamation marks accurately.

12. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 3
children should be able to:
Spelling
Correctly use a wider range of prefixes and suffixes.
Correctly spell year 3 words.
Grammar
Use a range of sentence structures with more than one clause.
Link ideas by using a wider range of conjunctions including when, if, because and although.
Consistently use the past and present tense correctly.
Organisation
Sometimes group ideas together in paragraphs.
Punctuation
Begin to use a range of punctuation including apostrophes and commas to separate clauses and inverted commas for direct speech.

14. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 4
children should be able to:
Spelling
Correctly use a wider range of prefixes and suffixes.
Correctly spell year 4 words.
Grammar
Use nouns and pronouns to link ideas and avoid repetition.
Make some adventurous and apt word choices.
Use a range of conjunctions to join sentences of more than one clause.
Organisation
Organise writing into sections by separating ideas using paragraphs, headings and sub headings.
Punctuation
Use capital letters, full stops, exclamation marks, question marks, inverted commas and apostrophes appropriately.

17. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 5
children should be able to:
Spelling
Spell most words correctly (years 3-4)
Spell some words correctly (years 5-6)
Handwriting
Produce legible joined handwriting.
Grammar
Use some cohesive devices * within and across paragraphs
Use different verb forms mostly accurately.
Use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions
Organisation
Consistently use paragraphs to organise ideas.
Punctuation
Use capital letters, full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, commas for lists, inverted commas for direct speech and apostrophes mostly correctly.
Begin to brackets, commas, dashes and semi-colons.

19. children should be able to:
By the end of Year 6
children should be able to:
Spelling
Spell all words correctly (years 3-4)
Spell most words correctly (years 5-6)
Handwriting
Produce legible joined handwriting.
Grammar
Create atmosphere and integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action.
Use a range of cohesive devices, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs.
Use adverbs, preposition phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail, qualification and precision.
Use passive and modal verbs appropriately.
Organisation
Select vocabulary and grammatical structures that reflect the level of formality required mostly correctly.
Punctuation
Use inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis mostly
correctly, and making some correct use of semi-colons, dashes, colons and hyphens.

22. Writing Assessment
We look at a range of independent pieces of writing.
We highlight each child’s target card depending on what the writing shows.
We compare writing with our partner classes at Acton.
Year 2 and Year 6 have different criteria.

24. What can you do to help? Handwriting practice.
Spelling practice of common exception words.
Use our grammar guide to help with SPaG homework.
Ask children to write for real purposes – thank you letters/ s, crosswords, cards to relatives and shopping lists etc.
Try our recommended websites for spelling and phonics.