Our approach to Writing

Our approach to Writing:

At Hollymount School, we aim to develop children who are confident, skilled and passionate writers - incorporating National Curriculum requirements as well as ensuring that our Hollymount Curriculum is adapted to suit the needs of our own cohort of children.  

We want children to understand the skills and knowledge necessary for writing for different purposes and audiences. Teachers use a range of starting points to inspire writing, including class fiction texts, non-fiction books, poems, pictures and videos. The Hollymount literacy curriculum has a good balance of both fiction and non-fiction writing.

We follow a three or four stage journey, progressing the children’s knowledge and skills in small, sequential steps. In the first stage, children are immersed in good modelling and examples of the text type they are studying, identifying what grammatical tools are being used. In the second they focus on the skills (according to their stage of learning) needed to achieve their end writing goal and in the third stage they write an extended piece. The fourth stage is flexible, but allows teachers to assess children’s mastery by providing an opportunity to apply learnt skills to another context (with the same purpose), without any modelling.  This can take place within Literacy or in other subject areas.

Writing is closely linked to Reading Practice lessons where a VIPERS approach is followed (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising). Reading Practice lessons are usually focused on the same class text, thus reinforcing skills, developing understanding and writing models from a range of genres and authors as well as building a love of reading for pleasure. 

writing curriculum progression.pdf