Writing

Writing at City Academy Whitehawk

At City Academy we follow the Talk for Writing approach to writing. The philosophy behind it being that children need to develop their spoken language before they can successfully write.

Children are taught text maps with visuals to tell a variety of stories and non fiction texts throughout each term and year. They begin by imitating the leaned text, move on to innovating it by changing key elements and finally they write independently based upon all they have learnt in the preceding weeks.

This approach allows our writing to be taught in creative and inventive ways with cross curricular links. It is underpinned with a focus on learning the grammatical structures of our language and the terminology to explain it.

We finish every half term with a celebration of the children's writing through artistic publishing. You can see many examples in our classrooms and corridors. 

Handwriting
Children are expected to write using the Nelson style of handwriting- a guide for which can be downloaded here: 

We use handwriting guidelines in both our Reading and Writing  exercise books to ensure that the children's work is presented to the very best of their ability.

Phonics and Spelling
Children begin learning phonics in our Early Years classes using the Read, Write, Inc programme. Please see the Reading page for more details! Their phonics learning continues in Year One at the end of which they sit the Phonics Screening check. For more information about this please speak to the Year One team or Mrs Church.

From Year 2 in addition to continuing with Read, Write, Inc we follow the No Nonsense spelling programme. This is a comprehensive programme which builds upon knowledge each year. Children are given spelling words to learn each week in conjunction with personal words from their writing work. We provide a selection of different activities each term for them to practise their spelling.