Writing at Haydon Abbey School and Pre-School

At Haydon Abbey we strive to ensure that every child is equipped with the skills needed to write with fluency and purpose. We know that writing requires a combination of complex skills and our focus is to teach these skills effectively and coherently across the school.

From the early years, our focus is on developing children’s fine motor skills, phonics and letter formation. Then, in years 2 to 6, we teach regular spelling and handwriting, to help children gain the transcription skills and fluency needed to succeed as creative writers.

To ensure children have the contextual understanding for composition, our reading and writing curriculums are linked. Children develop their writing skills by being immersed in a genre, practising key grammatical and language skills for each text type under the teacher’s expert guidance. Model examples of sentences and texts are created for the children to imitate, ensuring they are well placed to experiment and develop their own original pieces.

We believe that with accurate transcription skills, increased fluency and exposure to high quality texts and language, children will have the best opportunity to develop into accomplished, inspired writers.