The intent of our writing curriculum

At Blackhorse Primary School, we are committed to creating Champion Learners by giving our children the tools to communicate confidently and effectively. We recognise the opportunities and advantages a strong understanding of language can provide and our curriculum is designed to give our children the best opportunities to develop and master these skills to set them up for their bright futures.  

Through purposeful practice, our children are given plentiful opportunities to practice and master transcriptional and compositional skills. Our curriculum is carefully designed, using our ‘small steps’ approach, to ensure that children are discretely taught new grammatical skills in a sequential, logical order and given frequent opportunities to revisit previous learning before applying these skills to their independent writing. As well as grammatical content, regular teaching of spelling and handwriting, helps to support our children in producing writing which they can be proud of.   

We provide extensive opportunities by using high-quality texts as inspiration for all writing outcomes. The books we use are carefully chosen, covering a wide range of cultures, settings and real-life stories (climate, refugees, natural disasters). These books are a vehicle for our children to experience the wider world through the safety of stories. We use our ‘book immersion’ lessons to explore these stories and their wider context. As well as having a rich stimulus for writing, our children will also be given frequent opportunities to analyse different writing forms and styles; this enables children to develop their personal writers’ toolkits to become authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry for a range of purposes and audience. Our teachers have been trained and coached in modelling writing: they are able to concisely and accurately demonstrate the process of writing to the children, allowing them to see the mental processes an author goes through to produce good writing.  

We encourage personal effort by giving our children a variety of writing opportunities which are all rooted in purpose: to argue, explain, inform or entertain. Giving the children a clear intention for their writing and an audience, motivates them to produce work for a reader, not just for themselves. Through thorough planning sessions, carefully structured writing lessons and editing and redrafting opportunities, which utilise peer critique, the children are encouraged to always produce work which is better than their previous piece.

Our children are exposed to expert tuition by our team of brilliant teachers. Our teachers have developed and fine-tuned their subject knowledge through trust-wide training, in-school staff training and regular moderation meetings. Our curriculum is carefully designed and delivered in a way which is codified and consistent across the school. As well as fantastic teaching, we also have multiple author visits each year, meaning that every child has the opportunity to listen to professional writers who understands the processes and challenges of being a writer – the children find these visits hugely interesting and inspiring.

Click below to find out more about how we teach writing...