Early Writing
EYFS
Our reading and writing journey begins with our youngest children in Nursery where pre-reading and pre-writing skills are planned for meticulously by our Early Years team. Our Early Years team make sure the environment includes a range of resources, activities and play that encourages gross and fine motor skills. As children move into Reception, they start their formal phonics teaching where reading and writing skills are interlinked. Drawing Club is a playful, story-led approach, supporting our teaching of writing. Children are invited into the “club”, where each session begins with a story, film clip, or picture book. The children draw and expand on the world of the story.
Drawing Club includes:
• mark-making and storytelling through pictures
• explicit teaching of new and ambitious vocabulary
• adding labels, symbols, or early attempts at writing alongside drawings
• composing “codes” and sentences orally
• class teacher modelling imaginative extensions (“What if one pig built a house out of chocolate?”)
• prompting children to add new details and vocabulary
Year 1
Our approach to teaching English in Year 1 is supported by The Curious Quests, building strong, robust foundations to prepare children for the Y2 and KS2 English curriculum. The Curious Quests is an immersive adventure into story, poetry, make-believe and gives children a childhood that brims with endless possibilities to invent, imagine and story dream. Before the approach begins, Year 1 children continue their Drawing Club lessons for the first half term, allowing for a smooth, structured transition to The Curious Quests.
High quality texts, of a range of genres, and archaic animations are used as the stimuli for Curious Quests in Year 1. Alongside the National Curriculum, reading, writing and SPaG objectives are taken from our TPGs, carefully paced out across the year to ensure progression and to strong foundations.
At the end of every half term, we have a writing week in Year 1. As well as having a challenging and enriching continuous provision, children will work in small groups to write a range of genres. We use books and animations from our carefully curated text pacer as stimuli for these writing weeks, ensuring children's writing has context and is engaging.
