Writing

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”—William Wordsworth

At Mount Nod, our intent is for all children to become enthusiastic and fluent writers. We value the necessity to communicate clearly both verbally and through writing and therefore provide children with a variety of exciting opportunities to develop their writing skills throughout the broader curriculum. It is our belief that by providing children with opportunities to write for different purposes and audience, we are laying the foundations to develop a life-long love of writing. We strive to increase children’s confidence by providing them with depth, breadth and ambition in their learning through a curriculum which equips pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language and develops their love of literature. 

At the heart of each writing unit, is purpose and audience, which clarifies the style of writing required. Once the pupils know whether their writing is meant to inform, entertain, persuade or discuss, they can adapt the language and style of writing to ensure that it is clear, accurate and coherent. As far as possible, we want our pupils to see the impact of their writing on others, whether it's a classmate, sportsperson or an MP.

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” —Maya Angelou

Through meaningful writing opportunities, pupils will develop an understanding of the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and acquire a wide vocabulary to draw upon in their pieces.. Whilst the National Curriculum forms the foundation of our focus, we ensure that the children are provided with additional skills, knowledge and understanding through links to our broad and balanced curriculum.  This provides a rigorous and well-organised framework with purposeful opportunities for multi-genre, and cross-curricular writing. This is supplemented by high-quality selected texts and media which also form units of work. By adopting an adaptable approach, we are able to develop a more responsive and bespoke writing curriculum which not only motivates, engages and inspires our children to write but also ensures we are meeting the needs of all the children. Pupils are also given the opportunity to write within other subjects e.g. Non-chronological reports about Extreme Weather, persuasive letters to MP's about climate change or diary entries from the perspective of an evacuee in wartime Britain.

"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” - Anton Chekhov

Developing pupils’ writing skills is embedded at the heart of our curriculum through well sequenced lessons which build on the knowledge and skills previously gained. Our curriculum has a clear progression of skills to ensure children’s writing develops as they move through the school. We want our children to be able to write with grammatical accuracy and be able to apply spelling patterns correctly whilst using a neat handwriting style. We aim for all children to enjoy and recognise the value of writing and believe that a secure basis in literacy skills is crucial to a high-quality education. Children are encouraged to be independent writers from a young age and draw upon their personal and reading experiences within their writing. At Mount Nod we encourage our children to view themselves as authors by critically engaging in and discussing texts. Our main principal of Writing is to ensure we promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.” - Beatrix Potter

From Year 2 onwards, in addition to their writing lessons, children have discrete grammar and spelling lessons. The content for the grammar lessons is taken from the National Curriculum 2014 and is applied during their writing lessons. During spelling lessons, children are taught new spelling patterns and rules as well as high frequency words and words from the specific phase word lists. Handwriting is taught from Year 1 with children first learning to correctly form letters and numbers and then typically by the end of Year 3, children should be joining or beginning to join letters fluently.