Our writing curriculum in Years 1-6 is drawn from the Literacy Tree's 'Writing Roots' and has been carefully mapped to ensure that our pupils are motivated to write for a range of audiences and purposes using high-quality, diverse children’s literature by significant authors.

We do this by immersing our children in a range of literary worlds and themes, heightening engagement and creating curiosity through process drama, discussion and debate. This allows them to see themselves represented, and also explore the lives and experiences of others.

Our carefully-planned sequences of lessons provide opportunities to explore writing conventions, which are embedded, and apply them into authentic writing for a range of real-life audiences. The writing outcomes are chosen for their pertinence and relevance to the particular point in the text (not chosen for their ‘genre’), marrying the writing opportunity with the relevant conventions so that children see the purpose in the skills learnt. Skills and outcomes are revisited to practise and consolidate learning.

The explicit teaching of grammar is embedded across our curriculum in a way that links both to the engaging context of the text and to the purpose and audience that children are writing for. This provides meaningful motivation for children to attend to and use these conventions in their writing.

Frequent opportunities to practise writing with a range of audiences and purposes in mind are embedded within the pedagogy that has inspired our curriculum. The limits of working memory are carefully attended to within these opportunities through a focus on practising using specific conventions and vocabulary that build on prior knowledge and that are informed by purpose and audience. Planned repetition and regular practice of knowledge and skills increases the likelihood that pupils are able to retain these. Our curriculum is designed so that children repeatedly meet objectives over the course of an academic year and beyond. Each time they revisit these objectives, they develop increasingly complex mental models by integrating new knowledge and prior knowledge  and by applying this knowledge for a range of purposes and audiences in their writing.

Put simply, it is our belief that pupils ‘who write more. write better’ and through using inspiring, quality texts, our aim is to ensure that our pupils leave primary school as confident, enthusiastic and motivated readers and writers with a passion for literature.