Writing at Yearsley Grove
At Yearsley Grove:
- Writing is taught daily as part of a rich and varied curriculum, where we aim for all children to be competent, enthusiastic and creative writers.
- We develop children’s writing skills through engaging writing lessons based around high quality fiction and non-fiction texts and other stimuli, as well as short stand-alone handwriting, spelling, grammar and punctuation lessons.
- Children are encouraged to think carefully about the audience of a text and understand the purpose of the text in order to produce meaningful outcomes in a range of forms and genre.
- Writing lessons in years one (from Spring term) – six follow a three week cycle based on texts which link to reading and topic lessons. Writing about subjects the children are already familiar with, aims to reduce the cognitive load. In these cycles, a week is spent immersing themselves in the text, a week working with a partner to rehearse their writing and then moving on to apply their knowledge through independent writing in the third week of the cycle.
- Children are given the opportunity to build on their skills progressively each year. They revisit prior knowledge and repeat writing genres, in order to build strong mental models in their long-term memory and ease the process of writing composition.
- Children in years one – six also have the opportunity to produce short writes, during immersion and collabaritive writing weeks, which are based on a variety of thought-provoking stimuli.
- In the Early Years, children use role-play and oral rehearsal to before practising writing simple phrases or sentences and are given daily opportunities to write in the areas of provision.
- In the nursery, the children use Write Dance. Write Dance is an approach and method that provides movement opportunities, so children can develop the physical skills needed to develop their handwriting.
Read the document “How We Teach Writing at Yearsley Grove” to find out more information.