LOVE - SERVE - GROW
"Working together for the good of all""
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At St Michael’s we teach children to write for a purpose, whether it be stories, performance poetry, guides, letters, leaflets or writing from a character’s point of view. We immerse children in a rich literary world, fostering strong engagement and providing meaningful contexts for learning primary English.
Our English curriculum is guided by Literacy Tree, a comprehensive and thematic approach to primary English that places children's literature at its heart. It provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary, as well as spelling. We engage our pupils with a ‘hook’ into each text and then teach grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and text construction.
Through this ‘Teach Through a Text’ approach, children become critical readers and develop an understanding of audience and purpose in writing, as they encounter a wide range of significant authors and diverse texts, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry, which have been carefully and deliberately planned to enable strong and powerful outcomes.
Pupils are taught to identify the key features of successful works, before planning, structuring and writing their own. We use models, working through these so children understand what good writing looks and sounds like. After generating appropriate vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structures, we then guide pupils through the craft of creating successful writing. Children are encouraged to edit and redraft their pieces to produce high quality work.
Handwriting is taught from Reception upwards, following guidance from Little Wandle Letters and Sounds. In our Nursery setting, we provide a wide range of opportunities to develop fine motor skills and handwriting practise, as well opportunities for mark making and pattern exploration throughout our provision.
Pupils are well supported to adopt fluent and legible handwriting through a wide range of fine motor activities, followed by modelled patterns, letters and digits. Our joined, continuous cursive style is taught explicitly from Year 2, focusing on pose, posture, paper, position and pressure.
Our progressive plan for handwriting implementation is underpinned from research taken from the National Handwriting Association and allows our pupils to progress seamlessly from printing their letters and digits.
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