At Priory Rise, we aim to develop a love of writing in all our pupils. We want each of our children to see themselves as authors and for them develop the necessary skills to move on successfully to the next stage of their education.

In all year groups at Priory Rise, we teach writing through high-quality stimuli to engage the imagination before moving onto vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and writing. This ranges from picture books and learning to imitate texts, to poems, more complex chapter books, immersive real-life experiences, such as school trips and film. Over their school career, children will write in many fiction and non-fiction styles, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. Links are made across the curriculum to give depth and meaning to the writing.

We have a carefully planned writing curriculum. This has clear progression. It teaches, revisits and develops key skills and knowledge for writing at every level and in every year group. It works parallel to our systematic spelling progression as well as our reading skills progression. We believe that for mastery as a writer, our children need to understand how these areas of learning are linked.. We make sure that our children know the link between reading and writing. We teach them to write to entertain their reader and to read a text and analyse it as a writer.

We ensure that children are provided with exciting lessons that are carefully sequenced in order to build on their knowledge and understanding of writing. Learning is regularly revisited through cross-curricular lessons to help children become secure with skills.

Throughout the Early Years and Key Stage 1 children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later. An emphasis is placed on developing clear pre-cursive handwriting with ‘finger spaces’ between in each word. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their writing.

Our curriculum teaches the children to add variation and description to their work by developing their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers. By the end of Key Stage 1, children have been taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar.

In Key Stage 2, we revisit and build upon previous learning in terms of spelling, grammatical knowledge, syntax and text type. By the time children leave Priory Rise School in Year 6, the word knowledge they arrived with in Reception will have expanded enormously, giving them the language, they need to understand sophisticated texts and express themselves in a wide range of contexts and will be ready for Key Stage 3.