At Sitwell Infant School, we believe that literacy skills have a significant impact upon self-esteem, motivation and aspirations for the future. Being literate enables our children to be proactive in their own learning and to articulate their thoughts.

Our Writing Curriculum

We aim to support your children to become confident and inspired writers through a wide range of activities and teaching methods. Writing is a major part of the curriculum and along with reading, listening and talking, makes a significant contribution to the development of children as thinkers and learners. Here at Sitwell Infants, we are dedicated to promoting creativity through the written word supported by the structured development of grammar and punctuation.

Throughout their time in school, children access to a variety of texts to help them gain more knowledge about creating and learning how to improve their own writing. The close relationship between reading and writing is an important one for us to develop as we feel that it is particularly important for our children to have a clear purpose for their writing and an awareness of the audience for which they are writing.

As well as reading, children will use Read Write Inc. to help them to write letters, words and sentences. The process is similar to blending (how we teach them to read) but works in reverse. This is called SEGMENTING. Segmenting involves thinking of a whole word (e.g. cat) and segmenting it into the individual sounds (and thus letters which make it -e.g. c a t). Again, this initially begins orally as children learn to 'chop up' words in order to hear the individual sounds. The process of segmenting in Read Write Inc is called Fred Fingers.

Children use their Fred Fingers to identify the individual sounds in words. In the early stages, children are given a simple word and are told how many sounds are in that word. They then hold up that amount of fingers (with the palm of their hand facing them so they can see their fingers). As they say their word, they split their word up into individual sounds, using one finger for each sound in sequence (left to right). For example, in the word bag, children would be told that this word has 3 sounds. They would then hold up three fingers and look at them. The next step is to touch their left-most fingers and say the first sound (b). They then move to the next finger and say (a). Finally they touch their next finger and say (g).

As they become more confident at linking letters to sounds and at writing those letters they will become increasingly more and more able to write the words after they use their Fred Fingers. This is the basis of writing using their phonic knowledge. 

Children are supported to develop their writing skills by a range of imaginative starting points including educational visits, visual stimulus and events taking place in school or the wider community. Opportunities for high quality writing are also identified and developed across the wider curriculum. Integrating writing in such a meaningful and engaging way is central to continuing to raise pupil progress in writing and in promoting enthusiastic and independent writers.

Transcription and Composition

As children are taught handwriting and phonics we begin to work on transcription skills. This is where they write simple sentences that only contain sounds that they have been previously taught; so children can fully concentrate on spelling and handwriting; without having to make up sentences first. As they become proficient at transcription; we then move onto composition. This allows children to discuss their ideas and compose their own sentences before they write them down. The compositional aspect is only developed once children have mastered almost all sounds in phonics and have correct letter formation.

Teachers use a variety of approaches to ensure that all children achieve success including modelling and demonstrating, structured writing frames, direct and indirect instruction and collaborative group work. Our aim is always to develop a purposeful curriculum to meet the needs of the whole school learning community.

Children and young people will demonstrate their progress in writing through the degree of independence they show, the organisation and quality of their ideas, their skills in spelling, punctuation and grammar, the match of their writing to audience and the effectiveness of their use of language.