Writing

Our vision and ambition for Writing at Hemingford Grey Primary School 

Reception

We believe in immersing children in a magic world of tales and story whilst enriching their language skills, developing their fine motor and adopting  Greg Bottrill’s approach with Drawing Club and The Message Centre, as a vehicle to engage children to mark make and write.  This encompasses an approach to literacy that uses high quality texts to develop skills, share ideas and have a creative approach to their writing.   These skills are then linked to continuous provision using secret messaging starting from emergent mark making through to simple sentences. It gives our children the confidence and joy they deserve as writers and develops a culture in which children discover the delight in reading and writing.  

Year 1 to 6

At Hemingford Grey Primary, we believe that every child is a writer. We are passionate about developing every child’s knowledge, motivation and confidence in their writing.   We have chosen HFL Education’s ESSENTIALWRITING as the basis of our writing curriculum for years 1-6. This is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme which provides our children with opportunities and tools to write for a range of specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, our children feel inspired and ready to write high-quality outcomes within the classroom but also have the knowledge, strategies and confidence to choose to write in their own lives.  We follow a two year rolling programme to ensure children access complete coverage of the curriculum without unnecessary repetition. Medium term plans include adaptations to support with delivering a well-pitched curriculum within a mixed age class.

Each year group has 13-16 teaching units, all of which use diverse and high-quality literature as good examples of writing craft and to help to motivate or inspire children to write.

ESSENTIALWRITING is fully aligned with the National Curriculum for English including writing composition, vocabulary, grammar & punctuation for each year group.  Each writing unit is progressively structured and centred around the different writing purposes: to entertain; to inform; to persuade; to discuss. 

Alongside ESSENTIALWRITING, at Hemingford Grey Primary, we have adopted the FFT phonics programme and the FFT Jungle club spelling approach as the basis of our spelling curriculum. ESSENTIALWRITING supports our children to apply this learning in context and build their spelling confidence.  Writing models reflect age-appropriate spelling objectives and children are taught how to monitor the accuracy of their writing.  Handwriting is also taught.  We have adopted a cursive handwriting approach and use Letter join to support this to ensure that every child gains sufficient fluency for writing, with knowledge of accurate letter formation and how to join letters so that they can meet the National Curriculum expectations for each key stage.