"Writing is an extreme privilege, but it is also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone."

Amy Tan

"If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write"

Martin Luther King

We strive to create a love of writing both for enjoyment and for a purpose. We aim for every child to leave the school with the skills of an excellent writer who is able to think creatively about what they are writing, think about its impact on the reader and how they will achieve this as well as be able to write legibly and fluently. We want our children to be able to organise and structure their writing appropriately and be able to re-read, edit and improve their writing under the knowledge that it is okay to make mistakes when working on a piece of writing in draft form.

We are determined that our children learn more, know more and remember more of the technical features of English, developing a secure understanding of the grammatical features appropriate to their age group. We strive for children to be able to correctly identify and use the technical vocabulary related to spelling, punctuation and grammar at an age-appropriate level.

Our Writing curriculum is guided by Literacy Tree, a comprehensive and thematic approach to primary English that places children's literature at its heart. Literacy Tree is an award-winning platform that immerses children in a rich literary world, fostering strong engagement and providing meaningful

contexts for learning primary English.

Through this Teach Through a Text approach, children 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.

As a whole-school approach, Literacy Tree ensures that children explore at least 100 literary texts and experience the works of over 75 unique and significant authors throughout their time at our school.

This curriculum provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary, as well as spelling. Each plan leads to purposeful application within a variety of written outcomes.

Staff carefully select texts both from the Literacy Tree selection and using their own literary knowledge for the teaching of writing based on their themes and literary merit, with each text having fought for its place in the line-up. Many of our texts have some common themes, which develop as the children move through school; they may revisit a theme in KS2 that they were introduced to in KS1 at a simpler level.

Using a text as a stimulus for writing engages children in writing and provides them with a variety of purposes and audiences to write for. It also supports high quality book talk as children discuss the text that they have all been reading, sharing their thoughts and opinions on the themes, characters, plot, setting and storyline.

Children take great pride in their written work and regularly publish work for display across school with each class having a display board for their published pieces. Children work towards an independent piece of writing where they use all of the teaching input in that unit, as well as their wider reading, to draft, edit and publish their work.