At Blackwater, we believe that firm foundations in reading and writing are key to educational success.
Children are taught to read and write in reception through daily phonics sessions, with opportunities to practise their skills through well-planned, exciting, child-initiated activities.
We develop children’s vocabulary with daily words of the day. We also learn different sentence structures, grammar and punctuation.
In our writing lessons, children contribute to shared writing as a class as well as undertaking their own independent writing. We use peer assessment regularly and children are experts at identifying successes and areas for improvements in their buddies’ writing. We teach all our grammar and punctuation in the context of exciting writing tasks.
We use the KBER scheme for handwriting and Spelling Shed for spelling. Children begin learning cursive script in year one and work towards achieving their pen licence, when all writing is consistently joined.
Children learn weekly spelling rules, following the Spelling shed programme. They have lots of practise time in school and enjoy playing the games to learn the spellings at home. In each class we also play spelling games, with Bananagrams and Scrabble being two of our favourites; as well as using a range of spelling apps.
The writing process at Blackwater is broken into four key stages. Central to this process is exposing the children to high-quality written texts on which to base their own written work. These texts are chosen to ensure that a wide variety of genres and styles are covered. Central to this process is the development of children’s vocabulary and their application of ambitious language into their own written work.
The four stages of writing are outlined below. These are displayed in the classrooms on writing working walls and communicated to the children at each stage so they are aware of the requirements of each lesson.
In key stage one, these stages are condensed into an individual daily lesson structure that will involve an element of text analysis, before moving on to shared writing and eventually an independent writing task.
