Writing

At Sauncey Wood we follow Herts Essential Writing. The Essential Writing curriculum is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme, hooked in with high-quality literature, designed to teach children how to write for specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, children feel inspired and ready to write high-quality outcomes. Texts have been selected to ensure diversity (including authors, illustrators and poets), representation, relevance and high-quality writing. Opportunities for the application of reading, spelling and handwriting are woven through Essential Writing plans but we also teach these areas discretely though weekly guided reading, spelling and handwriting lessons. 

Some of the books that children have enjoyed reading as part of the Essential Writing scheme are:  

We start children’s writing journey by focusing on fine motor control skills, pencil grip and mark marking. Mark making is the start of the process of writing and we provide many inside and outside opportunities for children to practise these early skills. Alongside the phonic sound, children are also taught the letter name and we explicitly teach the formation of each letter. As children progress through the years, we introduce precursive script as an introduction to joined up handwriting. We follow the HfL handwriting scheme and use this in weekly handwriting lessons. Teachers model and use cursive script from year 3 upwards and where possible, we use cursive script in our exercise books and on display so that children have a consistent model of joined up handwriting.  

At Sauncey Wood we aim to have a purpose for all of our writing. Some examples of this are class books that live in the library, writing letters to partner classes or local businesses or having a story writing session with parents. We use working walls that show teacher and child-led examples of current learning, grammar and punctuation.  

SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) is both explicitly and implicitly taught at Sauncey Wood. SPaG is interwoven throughout all of our English lessons through writing and children are taught which punctuation and grammar is best suited for each genre of writing. 

We use the HfL spelling scheme to teach spelling. This cyclical scheme helps us teach all the statutory spelling patterns required and we work hard to ensure that all children know the spellings required for each year group through daily phonic lessons and explicit spelling lessons. Tricky spellings are taught and children have interventions in and out of class if they need extra help with tricky spellings and spelling patterns.  

Writing is celebrated at our weekly celebration assemblies and we have a school newspaper that is run by a group of year 3 pupils. We plan for whole school themed book weeks that run alongside World Book Day which celebrate writing across the school.