Writing
At Silver Springs, we teach writing by providing excellent models including high-quality texts – ranging from picture books to Shakespeare as well as immersive real-life experiences, such as school trips and visits.
Over their time at our school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination. We prioritise vocabulary accumulation and exploration, before moving on to sentence craft and creative writing.
Throughout the Early Years and Key Stage One, children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later. The emphasis on developing legible, fluent joined handwriting begins in Year Two. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their work to make it easy to read, whether it be fiction writing or a set of instructions.
Our curriculum teaches the children to add variation and description to their written work by extending their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers. By the end of Key Stage One, children are taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar.
This structural and technical knowledge is fostered alongside developing a love for writing as a lifelong means for communication and expressing themselves.
In Key Stage Two, children are taught to extend their writing and are given a range of opportunities to write for a range of purposes and audiences; to report, persuade and discuss. In striving for high quality writing and to support children’s independence, we have developed a progressive series of non-negotiable expectations for each year group. In Year Five and Six, we introduce discrete Grammar lessons. Throughout the school, we embrace IT as a powerful, inclusive tool that can be used to support and illuminate the writing process.
