At Moat House Primary School, we aim to foster a love of writing for all pupils. Our curriculum is designed to encourage and inspire our young learners to become creative, confident and skilled writers. We want our children to be enthusiastic, creative writers, who develop a life-long passion for writing. From Early Years through to Year 6, children are immersed in high quality writing activities, storytelling adventures, and interactive lessons. Staff guide our students on a thrilling journey to discover the power of words. From learning the basics of sentence structure and grammar to exploring different writing styles and genres, we empower our students to become articulate communicators and creative thinkers. 

Our core principle aims (from the National Curriculum) are to: 

• acquire a wide vocabulary which is used within their writing
• have an understanding of the spelling, grammar and punctuation needed to be a successful writer
• write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences

As a school, we follow the best practice taken from I Am a Clever Writer principles, which has been adapted to suit the needs of the children within our school. Medium Term Plans for each year group set out the aims for the writing curriculum, along with skills progression documents for each strand in the national curriculum and for different text types.

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:

​

1. Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
2. Interleaving (deliberate leaving and coming back to through beginning with exposure then keep returning to explore further) helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
3. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

Using this approach, KS1 children are taught daily, fifty minute English lessons. In KS2, the children receive nine sixty minute English lessons across a fortnight. During these lessons, children are given the opportunity to consolidate their learning as well as learning how to use the grammar and punctuation skills for their year group. They are given ample opportunity to write at length for a range of purposes and audiences. In addition to this, the children learn to edit and revise their writing through targeted teacher feedback, peer assessment and self-evaluation. We firmly believe this process helps to develop children’s independence when writing.

Grammar and Punctuation

Grammar and punctuation skills are incorporated within each English lesson. The teachers ensure that the teaching of grammar and punctuation is useful and purposeful with opportunities for children to see skills used within key texts or a WAGOLL (What a Good One Looks Like). Often, examples of key skills are added to the English working walls for children to refer back to. Children are taught how to use new grammar and punctuation examples from the text as well as consolidating previously taught skills in order to complete the writing outcome. They are taught the definition of key vocabulary and are shown ample examples of how to use this within their writing and their spoken language.

Spelling

As a school, we have adapted the best practise principles from Spelling Shed in order to teach children how to spell. Spellings are to be taught in separate spelling sessions but also continuously throughout the school day. Throughout the week, children will receive up to sixty minutes of discrete spelling lessons. In line with the Spelling Shed principles, teachers use a diagnostic test half termly to identify the area of need for the pupils within their class. From this, children are grouped into stages to adapt the teaching of spellings according to the children’s current ability.

In addition to this, all children are to be taught their year group word list (using Twinkl weekly plans in KS2), whilst also revising previous year’s lists. The idea of this approach is to enable children to make rapid progress within spelling by consolidating previous learning and teaching children the spelling patterns for their year group.

For children where extra support is required throughout KS1 and 2 (e.g. those children who did not pass the Year 1 phonics screening test or the resit in Year 2), have additional spelling interventions in place in line with our RWI phonics programme. 

Handwriting

For information regarding the teaching of handwriting at Moat House, please see the handwriting section below.