At Grangetown Primary School, we believe that every child is a writer. We are passionate about nurturing a love for writing, developing creativity, and empowering children to express themselves with confidence and flair. Through an engaging and structured approach, we inspire our pupils to craft ambitious, high-quality pieces across a wide range of genres.
In our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), we use Drawing Club to ignite children’s imagination and develop early storytelling skills. Through this creative approach, children explore language, ideas, and narratives, laying strong foundations for their writing journey.
As children progress through the school, we follow The Write Stuff, a proven approach that enhances sentence construction, deepens vocabulary, and ensures that children develop essential writing techniques. We place a strong emphasis on ambitious vocabulary to enrich children’s writing and provide them with the tools to become expressive, confident writers. Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar (SPAG) is fully embedded into our curriculum, ensuring children have a strong grasp of the technical aspects of writing.
In our ARC (Additionally Resourced Centre), we use Curious Quest to support children’s writing development in an engaging and structured way, ensuring all pupils have access to high-quality writing experiences tailored to their needs.
Books are at the heart of our writing curriculum. We carefully select high-quality texts across all genres to inspire children’s creativity, introduce them to new worlds, and spark their imagination. Whether it’s crafting adventure stories, persuasive speeches, or heartfelt poetry, our pupils experience a rich variety of writing opportunities that broaden their perspectives and build their confidence.
As Philip Pullman once said:
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
Intent
Writing is a crucial part of our curriculum at Grangetown Primary School. By the end of Year Six, we intend our children to have developed a love of writing and to be able to express their thoughts and ideas clearly and creatively through the written word. We also intend to create writers who can re-read, edit and improve their own writing, and enable pupils to be able to confidently use the essential skills of grammar, punctuation and spelling.
Implementation
In order to help us to develop confident, enthusiastic writers who can express themselves in a variety of different styles and across a variety of contexts, we have adopted the approach of ‘The Write Stuff’ by Jane Considine. This provides our children with regular opportunities to write for a range purposes and audiences. Writing tasks are specific and meaningful, and often meet a purpose to engage children and to illustrate how their writing skills can be applied to real life contexts. The use of high-quality texts is vital to what we do and the basis of our writing is around a wide range of books.
We use RWI Spellings to build on phonetic knowledge from KS1 and for children to understand the mechanics behind spellings. This is then applied into their writing.
Impact
Pupils will make good progress from their own personal starting points. By the end of Year Six they will be able to write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. Our pupils will acquire a wide vocabulary and have a strong command of the written word. Most importantly, they will develop a love of writing and be well equipped for the rest of their education.
For more information about ‘The Write Stuff’ and Jane Considine’s approach click on the image below.
