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Writing

Writing at Rickley Park

In Nursery, we introduce children to exciting early writing and mark-making experiences that combine movement, language and music. Inspired by Ragnhild Oussoren’s Write Dance approach, these activities help children develop strong early handwriting skills by building on whole-body movement and coordination. We focus especially on helping children move both sides of their body together, which supports skills needed for later writing.
Music and movement are used to spark imagination and language development. Each piece of music is linked to a theme or story, so children can enjoy the activity as part of a narrative or as a fun standalone session.
Rhythm, rhyme and voice are closely connected, so children are encouraged to use their voices to describe actions as they move and dance. Through mark-making and “movement drawings,” children naturally progress from large body movements to more refined hand and finger control. This approach gives children a motivating and stimulating environment, purposeful resources and enjoyable experiences that support the development of physical and early writing skills.

In Foundation 2 and Year one we use Drawing Club to inspire and ignite a love of writing.

This gives children a solid basis in writing short sentences, using a different text each week. We focus on vocabulary and basic skills, supporting developing phonics skills whilst also enjoying a book.

Drawing Club - "CAN I GO AND PLAY NOW..?"

From year 2 onwards we begin each year with Grammarsaurus’s Place Value of Grammar and Punctuation. This teaches basic sentence structure in a straightforward, mathematical way that ensures children will understand the parts of a sentence. We aim to give every child the tools they need to write fluently. By year 6, using this scheme, we ensure our children can write with basic punctuation solidly in place. For more information about this please see the “letter to parents” at the end of the page.

After the basics are covered in Autumn term, each year group has its own range of text types that are taught using high quality books and stories. We use Ready Steady Write, which used to be known as Read to Write.

Ready Steady Write - Primary School Writing Programme — Literacy Counts

Our basic writing unit sequence is:

  • Begin with immersal in a book, enjoy the story, consider vocabulary and discuss aspects
  • Present a WAGOLL (What a good one looks like) of the chosen text type, whether fiction or non fiction. Find the features we want to use.
  • Teach the grammar and features that we need and practise the skills
  • Write with teacher support – sharing a model write of a connected text
  • Independent write
  • The teacher assesses the independent writing, noting skills that need further practice

At the beginning of each lesson we have a short grammar starter and/or a dictation sentence so that children can embed key grammar and spelling skills.

PVPG-Letter-to-parents

Handwriting

At Rickley Park, our aim is for every child to be able to use cursive (joined) handwriting by upper key stage two. This makes writing more fluent, faster and supports spelling patterns.

Whilst children are learning phonics, they begin to form letters using the Read, Write inc formation, which includes a handy ditty for each letter! Once the basics are in place, we begin to teach handwriting using a scheme called Letterjoin:

Letter-join whole school handwriting scheme

Children will have a handwriting lesson each week, followed by regular practice sessions. They are encouraged to try different pens out to see what works for them, once ready to move on from pencil.