Handwriting

We have a whole school approach to improving letter formation and handwriting. The scheme that we use is called Kinetic Letters. It is based on ensuring the children have the strength in their bodies, arms, wrists, hands and fingers to prepare them for the skill of handwriting.
 

As part of this we have been doing lots of activities that will make our bodies stronger for writing. You could try some of these activities at home...

• We do some of our writing lying on our tummies, resting on our elbows with our legs out straight; we call this our strong body position. We also do our writing with the whiteboards stuck onto the wall as this builds strength in our core, which helps to support a comfortable and strong writing position at the tables.
• To make our ‘three friends’ (thumb and first two fingers on our writing hand) really strong we have been doing lots of pinching and squeezing activities using rubber bands, pegs, play dough, foam shapes and tweezers and threading activities.

Practise the 5 core positions of Kinetic Letters: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhaNtxumgOs

Writing

Writing Toolkit

We implement the use of our 'Writing Toolkits' from Year 2 - 6. This is a planning tool, which we create collaboratively with our pupils, to identify our writing's purpose, audience, effect, skills, application, and appropriate vocabulary. This allows our children to take responsibility for the creativity of their writing.

Model Examples

All our creative writing pieces begin with a high quality model example, which models the purpose, audience, effect, skills, application, and appropriate vocabulary. This sets high expectations and aspirations for our children, which is at the heart of our school ethos.

Shared Writing

Shared and modelled writing, takes place within English lessons. This allows the teacher to demonstrate high quality writing, while encouraging the children to share and up-level their own and peers' ideas. We promote the idea of 'magpieing' words, phrases, structures and ideas for the children to independently apply these into their own writing. 

Reading into Writing

Here, at Foley Park, we love using reading to inspire writing and so you will find that many of our units are inspired by a range of quality texts. We are great fans of 'magpieing' words, phrases, structures and ideas from skilled authors and we find this helps us to write with greatest impact and effect. 

Talk for Writing

This is a tool that we often use when wanting to develop non-fiction writing. We enjoy how Pie Corbett uses fictional themes for non-fcition writing, so that the focus is on the vocabulary, structure and layout rather than focusing soley on facts. We use this well to engage children, with different styles of writing and with different purposes. 

Writing purpose

Children are expected to write frequently in a range of forms. This may be responses to a text, considering text feature grids, short writing tasks such as writing as a character description, or writing a whole story or report as an extended piece of writing. At Foley Park, we don’t teach specific genres of writing; we teach purposes for writing which are: to entertain, to inform, to explain and to discuss.

Cross Curricular:

Where appropriate, literacy units will link to creative curriculum themes to promote cross curricular learning. We want to immerse our children in their learning and so we aim to plan for units of writing that compliment the learning challenge across our curriculum.