At King’s Cliffe Endowed Primary School, children develop the knowledge and skills they need to become confident and increasingly independent writers.

Writing develops progressively from children's earliest attempts to communicate meaning through marks, words and simple sentences to increasingly sophisticated writing for a range of purposes and genres.

Alongside developing spelling, grammar and punctuation, children learn how to explore models of writing, generate and organise ideas, plan and draft, make deliberate choices about language and structure, and evaluate and improve their work.

Developing as Writers

In Foundation, children begin by thinking of, saying and writing simple sentences. Talk, stories, rhymes and songs support children in developing their ideas and vocabulary before committing these to writing.

As children progress through school, they encounter both fiction and non-fiction and learn to identify the features, vocabulary and punctuation associated with different genres.

Models of writing increasingly support children in understanding structure, vocabulary, grammar and purpose before they apply and adapt these features within their own compositions. By Years 5 and 6, children develop a strong understanding of the purpose of a range of genres and adapt their writing accordingly.

Planning and Drafting

Children are taught that effective writing begins before the first sentence is written.

In Key Stage 1, children use approaches including story maps and plans to organise and rehearse their ideas. They talk through sentences orally, and drama may be used where appropriate to help embed their plans.

As they progress through Key Stage 2, children discuss and record ideas and use planning approaches including story maps, story mountains and planning skeletons. They increasingly identify for themselves the features they need to include and discuss their plans with their peers.

Older children use drafting to make increasingly deliberate choices about grammar and vocabulary, refining and developing their ideas as their compositions take shape.

Spelling

Spelling develops systematically throughout children's time at King’s Cliffe.

Children begin by using their developing phonic knowledge to represent the sounds they hear in words and learn to spell familiar and common exception words.

As their knowledge develops, children learn spelling patterns and conventions including prefixes, suffixes, homophones and possessive apostrophes. They increasingly use dictionaries to check spelling and meaning.

In Years 5 and 6, children build upon this knowledge by considering morphology and etymology, distinguishing between words that are commonly confused and recognising that some spellings need to be learnt specifically.

More information about the teaching and progression of spelling can be found on our Spelling page.

Grammar and Sentence Structure

Children's understanding of grammar develops alongside their ability to communicate increasingly complex ideas.

Children begin by learning how words combine to make sentences and are introduced to word classes including nouns, verbs and adjectives.

As they progress, children learn to construct and manipulate increasingly complex sentences and develop their understanding of grammatical structures and terminology.

By upper Key Stage 2, this includes relative clauses, degrees of possibility, active and passive voice and differences between formal and informal language. In Year 6, children also encounter the subjunctive form.

Structuring Writing

Children develop an increasing understanding of how writing is organised.

Beginning with simple sentences, children learn to sequence sentences into short pieces of writing and maintain an appropriate tense.

They progress to organising ideas into paragraphs and making choices about pronouns and nouns to support cohesion and avoid unnecessary repetition.

By Years 5 and 6, children use a wider range of cohesive devices to connect ideas within and across paragraphs and apply their understanding of structure when writing across different genres.

Punctuation

Children's use of punctuation becomes increasingly sophisticated as their writing develops.

Beginning with capital letters, full stops and finger spaces, children progress to using question marks, exclamation marks, commas and apostrophes.

They later learn to punctuate direct speech and use punctuation including commas for fronted adverbials and punctuation to indicate possession.

In upper Key Stage 2, children build upon this knowledge through the use of parenthesis, colons, semicolons, dashes and hyphens, learning to make choices that clarify meaning and support increasingly sophisticated writing.

Editing and Improving

Children are taught to return to their writing and consider how it can be improved.

This begins with rereading their work to check that it makes sense and talking about their writing with teachers and other pupils.

As they progress, children increasingly evaluate their own and others' writing, proofread for spelling and punctuation and suggest changes to grammar and vocabulary.

By Years 5 and 6, children make increasingly purposeful changes to enhance effects and clarify meaning, considering consistency of tense, subject and verb agreement and the appropriate register for their writing.

Sharing and Performing Writing

Writing is also something to be shared.

Children develop from reading their writing aloud clearly to using appropriate intonation to communicate meaning.

As they progress, they learn to control intonation, tone and volume, culminating in Years 5 and 6 with opportunities to perform their own compositions using intonation, volume and movement so that meaning is clear.

Writing Curriculum Overview

Our Writing Curriculum Overview shows how children's knowledge and skills develop progressively from Foundation to Year 6.

It sets out progression across spelling, planning and drafting, composition, sentence structure and grammar, text structure, grammatical terminology, punctuation, editing and improving, and the performance of children's own writing.

Please view our Writing Curriculum Overview below to see the progression of learning across the school.