We Are Writers

At St. Aidan’s, we aim for all children to become confident, skilled and creative users of language. Our curriculum includes: speaking and listening, reading, writing, grammar, spelling and handwriting. Our approach involves the children exploring a variety of text types e.g., stories, information writing and recounts of stories or events. They do this using a number of strategies, such as playing language games, identifying common features of a text type, role-play, and evaluating different examples of a genre.

Our curriculum has been designed to encourage children to become confident and enthusiastic about English. We have achieved this by listening to our pupils’ voice to ensure the curriculum is designed to be ambitious for all learners. Through our English Curriculum, we strive to teach the children how important their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills will be in the real world. We offer rich and vibrant opportunities for learners to be exposed to a variety of genres and authors. We intend for all learners to be able to read, write and spell to age –appropriate expectations and have provided sufficient time in the timetable to allow for this. We have a range of strategies in place for learners to develop a love for reading and to be able to read confidently and fluently. We want our children to have a positive attitude towards communication and to be able to express their emotions and their ideas independently. We aspire to equip our children with these skills now and the tools to develop those skills in the future.

At St. Aidan’s, we endeavour to plan writing from a class book using the book as a hook for our writing, wherever possible writing at St. Aidan’s should have a purpose and teachers pick class novels to link with other learning.

Speaking and Listening at St Aidan's

Our aim is for children to learn to communicate their thoughts, ideas and opinions clearly and succinctly, as well as to listen to and reflect on the ideas of others. We encourage children to take turns in conversations and adapt their speech to a range of situations and audiences. From an early age, the children are encouraged to participate in a range of activities such as drama and role-play.

Writing at St Aidan's

We want our pupils to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. We want pupils to acquire a wide vocabulary, a solid understanding of grammar and be able to spell new words by effectively applying the spelling patterns and rules they learn throughout their time in primary school. We believe that all pupils should be encouraged to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in part by developing a good, joined, handwriting style by the time they move to secondary school. We aim for our children to develop their ability to write in a wide range of genres, both fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Writing is developed from an early age by mark making and activities to develop fine motor skills. In reception, children spell words by identifying sounds in them and representing the sounds with a letter or letters and quickly move on to writing words, simple phrases and sentences that can be read by others. In KS1, children are taught to use finger spaces, full stops and capital letters and progress to using other forms of punctuation such as question and exclamation marks. They are taught about using engaging and meaningful vocabulary to make their writing interesting. By the end of KS1, pupils begin to evaluate and make some improvements to their writing. In KS2, pupils develop competence in the accuracy of grammar, punctuation and spelling and the structure of text composition. Children are taught the skills of planning and drafting an extended piece of writing, organising their work coherently and the processes of evaluation and editing. Pupils will apply their skills through a range of genres considering vocabulary and structures appropriate for the purpose and audience.

We help our children to develop writing skills so that they have the stamina and ability to write at the age expected standard. Our school uses a range of activities to excite and support this, including a range of class novels film clips and imagery, music, ICT and discussion. Children are regularly given the opportunity to write “just for fun”. We encourage children to take ownership of, and pride in, their work and to use a range of methods to develop this including shared and guided writing, self and peer assessment and discussion in talk partners.

We provide varied and exciting opportunities for writing for purpose and we encourage pupils to see themselves as authors and poets. These include World Book Day and various writing opportunities for publishing their work in the Weekly Newsletter.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-primary-curriculum