Becoming a Writer at St Michael's

Becoming a writer at St Michael's

At St Michael’s, our writing curriculum is designed to enable children to become creative, accurate and interesting writers who show control and choice over their writing and who are able to adapt it to meet different contexts and for different purposes. At the heart of our curriculum is our belief that writing should always be taught through a high-quality text, be it fiction, non-fiction or poetry, and that these texts should be varied, culturally diverse and matched to the needs of individual classes of children. We teach writing skills in the context of these texts in order to teach children how the choices they make as writers impact on readers in varying ways.

Writing is purposeful and always with a clear outcome to work towards. Children are involved in collaborative discussions in deciding what an effective piece of writing looks like and these ‘effects’ shape the teaching sequence. Writing skills are then taught rigorously and with secure subject knowledge.

Vocabulary is high profile across the curriculum and is taught both explicitly and implicitly; pupils are excited to learn new words and there is a buzz around vocabulary across the school. As a result, children demonstrate a broad and balanced vocabulary, they speak articulately and are confident to share their ideas and opinions in a range of forums.

Our curriculum for writing is progressive, rigorous and engaging. Although staff choose texts to match need and so texts do change year on year, here is a selection of some of the high-quality texts we have been teaching writing through this year: