Writing

At Royal Park we believe that to develop a whole child they need to be given real life experiences and opportunities throughout their education to develop their own opinions and to be able to express themselves confidently in a variety of different ways.

In order to achieve this we strive to develop every child's skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Each term, every year group's learning theme is centred around a high quality, vocabulary rich text. The texts build upon each other throughout the academic year and throughout the child’s journey through the school. This allows the children to make useful links between areas of learning and consolidate their knowledge and skills. We believe this allows for every child to be exposed to the wider world and provides opportunities for self expression through writing.

Teachers at Royal Park plan and prepare for all children to write in a variety of contexts and will plan for WOW days and hook lessons to introduce each new theme and text.  These experiences allow the children to have the ideas to put onto paper in their writing. They are then given opportunities to write in different genres: stories, reports, explanations, instructions, poems and play scripts; all in meaningful contexts.

Handwriting

Our school's cursive handwriting style has been developed to help children to learn to write with fluency and accuracy, and is taught and modelled consistently throughout the school. It is available as a model to children in every classroom. This style of handwriting is also good for children with dyslexia and for children who need more support with their fine motor skills.

Children in EYFS begin to write. They build their fine and gross motor skills through, mark making and then start forming letters. They form the letter shapes while making the phonetic connections to the letter sounds. They then gradually progress through the journey of writing to joining the cursive script into fully joined words.

As a school our aims in teaching handwriting are that the pupils will:

• Learn the conventional ways of forming letter shapes, both lowercase and capitals.
• Understand the importance of clear presentation in order to communicate meaning.
• Take pride in the presentation of work, developing handwriting with a sense of enjoyment and achievement.
• Use their skills with confidence in real life situations.
• Develop a fluent, comfortable, legible, joined handwriting style.

Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG)

At Royal Park we believe that pupils should be exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and be taught how to use this so they can articulate their opinions in reading, writing and spoken language. Our whole school spelling programme ensures that children are taught Spelling, punctuation and grammar lessons daily with two lessons following our whole school programme and two lessons teaching SPaG explicitly to coincide with their writing genre. 

Pupils at Royal Park are taught the correct grammatical terms in English and how they can use them consistently and correctly in their writing.