Writing

Intent Statement

 At Christ Church, we aim to nurture confident, resilient and articulate members of society with the cultural capital to flourish into life-long learners, no matter what their starting point. We provide children with engaging, purposeful opportunities for writing, underpinned by effective oracy skills, a fundamental understanding of GPS, an ever increasing vocabulary, a wealth of real-life experiences and immersion in high-quality texts.

One of our guiding principles is, ‘reading as a writer and writing as a reader’; we do not want children to view reading and writing as separate entities, at whatever age or stage. Although first and foremost our children read for pleasure, we also want them to read analytically, so they are conscious of style, sentence formation and construction of plot, character, description and dialogue. We do this through the use of Talk4Writing, where children are explicitly and systematically taught the process of writing, including how to plan, draft, share, evaluate, revise, edit and publish their work. Our aim then is to embed writing ‘tool kits’ so that our pupils carry with them the essential skills needed from year group to year group.

This all begins in our EYFS, with an emphasis on the development of oracy skills to support writing. We aim to instill a, ‘have a go’ approach to writing alongside the systematic teaching of phonics, spelling and sentence level work. Writing corners and role play areas equipped with exciting opportunities to mark make and write all foster an early interest and enthusiasm for writing. This ‘have a go’ approach continues throughout the school, where we strive to continue to spark our young writers’ imagination and inspire them to want to write with flair and purpose.

A fundamental reason we developed our creative curriculum almost four years ago, was to respond to the experience and vocabulary gap within our community. Through topic-based teaching, we endeavour to unlock the excitement of writing partly by and to highlight its importance not only in allowing pupils to explore new subjects and release their potential to learn and grow but also in improving self-esteem, behaviour and a child’s future life chances.

Subject Overviews

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Coming soon…