English curriculum overview for 2023-24:

Our vision for writing is to teach all children how to write legibly and coherently for a range of purposes through exposure to high-quality models of a variety of text types.

“Raising Aspirations” is embedded into all elements of school life and learning at Minet Infant and Nursery School, including in the writing curriculum. Writing is an integral part of the school’s core curriculum and through creating a coherently sequenced writing curriculum that is relevant to the children’s needs and interests, we aim to provide the best possible life chances for each child, opening up the advantages and opportunities the world has to offer. To enable this, we aim for every child to leave our school having the tools to, one day, become reflective writers who do so independently for a range of purposes.

Writing plays an important role in working towards the aims of the school’s curriculum. We aim for all children learn the sounds in the English language to support their ability to write words, phrases, sentences and texts. We are aware of the importance of developing the children’s language skills and so we purposefully create model texts that are above the children’s writing ability so that they are exposed to and explicitly taught rich language and complex sentence structures. We do this primarily through daily English sessions for all children using the ‘Talk For Writing’ approach, which is based on imitating language orally, before analysing high-quality model texts, participating in shared writing sessions and observing modelled writing, before writing their own innovated version independently. We also have handwriting sessions 3 times a week and use the Nelson handwriting scheme for this. Spelling is taught explicitly weekly, whilst grammar is embedded into our English and Phonics lessons. These lessons will then enable them to transcribe and compose a range of fiction texts, non-fiction texts and poetry linked to the core text they are studying.

Furthermore, we aim for our school values of respect, resilience and responsibility to be ingrained into our writing curriculum. These values are explored through our book choices, many of which contain plots that relate to our values, as well as through writing texts whose purpose is to promote or discuss our values.

Designing a curriculum that is centred around high-quality texts ensures that children experience a diverse range of key texts during their time with us. We believe it is important all children have access to and experience writing a range of texts that will broaden their vocabulary, develop their communication and support them to compose and transcribe a range of texts