Writing at SSMJ

At SS Mary and John, reading and writing are intertwined as we follow a book-based curriculum in all year groups. Each year group explores high-quality, engaging texts which are a basis for our writing. Writing is delivered through a carefully planned sequence of lessons which cover vocabulary, grammar, shared writing, drafting and editing. We follow the Grammasaurus genre progression and grammar progression documentation to ensure skills and knowledge are carefully built on year upon year.

Children in our Early Years spend time developing their fine and gross motor skills in a range of ways across the continuous provision as well as practising letter formation and using their phonics to write simple words. In Key Stage One, children continue to apply their phonics to writing words and simple sentences about stories they have explored as they gain confidence and begin to write for different purposes. Children continue to build on this knowledge in Key Stage Two as they write at length for different audiences and purposes before publishing their written work. At SS Mary and John, we follow a planning, drafting, editing and publishing process as we believe it is important for children to understand the process which authors go through to achieve their finished piece of writing.

Children take pride in their written work and enjoy publishing their work for display around the school as well as sharing their writing with peers. Children across Key Stage One and Two take part in daily handwriting session where they use the LetterJoin cursive handwriting script.   

Below, you will find a list of skills/targets for each year group. We teach these throughout the year through specific grammar lessons and within our writing lessons. Children are then expected to use these skills in their independent writing.

Spelling at SSMJ

We know that in order to be amazing writers, we need to also be super spellers! Each year group has a list of spellings which they need to learn and these are taught throughout the year. We have weekly spelling lessons where we focus on learning spelling rules and applying these, we then have daily spelling sessions where children practise their taught spelling rule and we have a spelling test each Friday. We really enjoy our spelling lessons as we get to learn through fun activities. Keep your eyes peeled for photos from our exciting spelling lessons!

Each week, children will be given between 5 and 10 spellings for their homework. It is important that they are learning these at home so that they can then use these in their writing. 

Below, you can find the year 1 - year 6 spellings for children to continue to learn at home. For EYFS spellings, please refer to the phonic information on our phonics page. 

Exciting writing opportunities at SSMJ...

Roald Dahl Day

To celebrate Roald Dahl Day, each year group enjoyed reading a different classic text written by Roald Dahl and exploring the text together before completing writing to be displayed around the school. A range of texts were enjoyed across the school:

Year 1: Revolting Rhymes

Year 2: George's Marvellous Medicine

Year 3: The Twits

Year 4: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 

Year 5: Matilda

Year 6: The Witches

Thomas the Gorilla

We were lucky enough to have another visit from Teach Rex and to learn all about 'Thomas the Gorilla' and his life story. Each year group were introduced to Thomas and had the opportunity to learn about the issue of deforestation and how this has impacted on the lives of Thomas, his family and other animals around the world. 

Every year group participated in grammar workshops around the issue of deforestation which prepared us for our writing units where we wrote persuasive speeches, balanced arguments and information texts about a range of issues which Thomas faced.

Teach Rex

We were lucky enough to have a visit from our very own dinosaur friend 'Jam the T-Rex'. Our exciting week started with the arrival of some mysterious eggs which we found in the playground. We then took part in exciting workshops where we got to meet Jam, discuss vocabulary we could use to describe Jam and look at grammatical structures when writing about dinosaurs. Everyone really enjoyed our T-Rex visit and each class has produced fantastic writing based upon this experience. We have written some amazing descriptions of Jam, stories about dinosaurs, information texts about T-Rex's and newspaper reports about the visit.

Art week

Recently,all classes completed a different project for Art week. As well as creating different art pieces, children also had the opportunity to read a book linked to that topic and create a piece of writing around that book. Here are some examples of the exciting work which Year 1 have been completing around their topic 'The Arctic'...