Writing

At Palatine, mark making and writing is celebrated and promoted across the curriculum. We promote and encourage pupils in early acquisition of these skills through a dedicated mark making or writing area within each learning environment.  Writing and mark making is also celebrated across the school with teachers encouraged to use pupils own writing and mark making on displays where possible. Phonics teaching allows pupils to link their knowledge of phoneme recognition to grapheme creation and this is promoted through an interesting array of mark making and writing opportunities.

Writers who are working within the pre key stage frameworks and above are given many talk for writing and cross curricula writing opportunities through the revised curriculum. This includes discrete writing instruction such as handwriting and learning about forms and features of different writing styles.

For our pupils at the earliest stages of writing, sensory mark making provides pupils with opportunities to be able to explore form, pattern, line and tracking. It enables pupils to develop the early skills of moving from left to right, associating their own movement to marks made, differentiation of marks made in a range of media and early symbolism and meaning of marks through mark making stories and rhymes.

As pupils progress they investigate writing for a purpose, developing control in using tools and creating marks such as vertical, horizontal patterns and simple shapes including letter shapes where able that have meaning. Some will be working to put letter shapes together to create words that are spelt correctly through phonics and high frequency words practise. Pupils investigate the construction of writing through exploring making sentences using different tools (such as Communicate in Print, Colourful Semantics, word cubes).

Pupils will have opportunities to investigate different genres of writing, and how these are organised i.e. making a newspaper layout, non-fiction information page, letter headings etc. and investigate the process of writing i.e. through planning what I am going to write, writing it and then editing what I have written in my stories and diaries. Children will investigating the different types of words in a sentence i.e. adjectives, verbs and where these go to make a sentence more exciting and make sense and how these are connected to make different poetry and descriptive writing.

Pupils will then build on their writing knowledge to develop and build both simple and complex sentences using a range of tools. They will have opportunities to develop short pieces of writing through combining sentences together to build meaning for a range of writing genres and purposes. Pupils will develop a deeper understanding of spelling, punctuation and grammar to improve writing and understanding when these aspects are used in writing.